(another) "recovering trashed files" question??

[williemyers]

h'lo all, here's (yet another) question about recovering files that have been "empty trash"-ed (*not* Secure Empty Trash).
I'm trying to recover some files from a specific non-system drive. I was reading a post over in MacOSX Hints and came across the following solution, written by a guy back in '07. This solution seems *way* too easy and that thread is locked, so I thought some of you might offer opinions on it. BTW, I've tried it on my MacPro/10.5.7 and can't get past the "Used Finder to search for the Folder .Trash" step......

Connected machine (MacBookPro) to desktop as Target disk.

Used Finder to search for the folder .Trash
(I can't recall now where I got that idea, I think I was searching for a trash log or something and found .Trash instead.)

Double-clicked on the .Trash folder for the macbook (one appeared for each HDD). This opened a new window with my deleted files in it.

Dragged files to backup disk on desktop machine, just in case.

Dragged files from .Trash directly back to where they should have been and crossed fingers. The files seemed to just be moved rather than copied so I was hopeful nothing had been overwritten.

Restarted smoothly, all systems go.

So there you go....does this seem reasonable/doable?
many thanks,
b myers

 

[geoffreak]

Once you delete the files in trash, they can no longer be accessed. The data is still on your drive, but it will be overwritten the next time anything is written to your drive (likely already happened).

There are applications which can search for this remaining data, but I don't know of any for Mac OSX and the Windows ones only work for NTFS or FAT32.

You can use Time Machine to get the files you deleted back if you have a backup though.