Could a lost file be found as something else?

[toddisalive]

Please forgive my question, for it may be an incredibly stupid one.

I have a 20 gig hard drive from a 2001 iBook. When my iBook crashed back in '04, there was a screenplay on there that was not saved anywhere else. It has tremendous sentimental value to me, and I would really like to retrieve it. I've ran some data recovery software that's uncovered a gargantuan amount of data, most of it being completely unreadable to me.

Additionally, I have found an AppleWorks file that could be the script, but it is ZERO bytes in size, and Pages won't even open it, saying that it is not a valid AppleWorks file.

So I'm curious...is it possible that the document is lost, but somehow the contents of it are somewhere else on the drive as metadata in other unreadable formats. And if that's the case, how would I go about translating the unreadable data back into something that IS readable?

 

[aicul]

You are facing a tedious time consuming exercise.

I actually solved a similar problem by talking about the lost file to everyone I knew. Then surprisingly someone said... but remember we edited it on my computer once... and there it was sitting in the "documents" folder.

Wasn't the last version, but a sufficiently recent version for my needs.

Now I use TimeMachine.

 

[toddisalive]

Haha, wow. That's awesome for you. Unfortunately, we worked exclusively on my laptop, and we were so damn stupid--nobody once thought to e-mail it or back it up. This is actually the reason why I've never lost a file since. I'm overly careful now, with all of my files. I'm thinking that this file will be forever dubbed as the one that got away...

 

[toddisalive]

By the way...

What is this "tedious time-consuming exercise" you speak of?

I'm willing to do it, whatever it is. Just show me the way. I BEG YOU!

 

[chrfr]

Additionally, I have found an AppleWorks file that could be the script, but it is ZERO bytes in size, and Pages won't even open it, saying that it is not a valid AppleWorks file.

You can be assured that if the file is 0 bytes that it isn't the file you're looking for; there's no content in it.