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Pleeeease help!!!!! (Deleted GarageBand Files)

brobson

brobson

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 13, 2004
512
6
Dallas
I recently deleted all my Garageband files and emptied the trash by mistake, and I spent ALL YESTERDAY trying to find software to recover it.
I spent $100 for Data Rescue 2, which I thought would work, but after talking to their customer service i was informed that DR2 is incapable of recovering "packaged files", hence Garageband. Please i need these files more than anything! Does anybody know of any other program that can recover my Garageband files??
PLEASE HELP!!!!
-Brenda
 
Well first of all, STOP using that computer. Any time you save data or what not, it runs the risk of writing over the files you want to recover, rendering them unable to be recovered. So if possible, stop using it right now and move to another computer.

What were you doing when you deleted all your GarageBand files? What do you mean by that exactly? That's a pretty hard thing to accidently do.

Are you talking about the GarageBand app, GarageBand loops, or saved songs that you made in GarageBand?
 
Do you mean the GarageBand application itself or files you've created with GarageBand? If it's the app, it's on your OS X install disk and you can reinstall any time.

However, if it's the files (which I assume it is from your panic) I don't see what "packaged files" has to do with it. If a data rescue app can recover any file (I've never used one so can't comment on that) DR2 should be able to recover your files as long as the HDD sectors containing the files haven't been overwritten. But whatever the real story here, make sure you don't use your Mac, at all, for any reason, until you're sure whether the files can be recovered. Turn it off now if you haven't done so yet.
 
Ya, it's individual songs I've made from garageband, and that's the app that they open in.
I was trying to free up space on my computer to install something, and I threw away a folder that held all my garageband data. I don't know how many more things I threw away before I installed the program (which was a jampack). Once it had been installed I realized that the folder I thought held my garageband data was empty; they had been in the folder I mistakenly threw away.
The guy at DR2's customer service spoke with the manager, and after about 5 minutes they confirmed that I would be unable to retrieve the files due to them being "packaged" (or something to that effect).
Is there any hope left..?
 
Slightly off topic, but if your hard drive is so full that you need to free up space for Jampack, you really aught to get a bigger hard drive, or an external hard drive to store all of your data (like your GarageBand songs).
 
But what should I do about my files???
Is there any chance of getting them recovered?
 
Maybe I'm being really dumb here (I've been known to be sometimes) I still don't understand what DR2's customer support means by "packaged" files.

They are files you moved to the trash. When you do an empty trash, all it does is remove references to the deleted files, it doesn't overwrite the sectors unless OS X saves data over the "freed" up disk space (hence the recommendation to not run the computer until you're sure you've either recovered your data or you know there's no chance to do so).

Even if the customer support thought you were talking about the GarageBand app itself, I don't understand what "packaged" means. Apps are fundamentally just subfolders under your Application folder that OS X represents differently to you. If you move an app (ie. a directory) to the trash, you're changing a reference to the directory containing the individual files. But any data recovery should still be able to recover contents of folders.

Anyway, did you make it clear you were talking about individual song files and not the app? I would contact them again and ask for clarification.
 
No, your applications are not just sub folders in your Application folder, at least I do not believe they are. Applications are numerous files put together inside what is called a package, almost in the same way that you could view a zip file, just without the compression. That is why you can right-click on many files or applications and select View Package Contents and see what is inside. DR2 people were likely correct in saying that you cannot get packaged contents. You may find a number of the files that were within a package, but you would have to know how to arrange them and keep them all together, and that will most likely be close to impossible. But I have not done this before, so I'm not sure.
 
KD7IWP said:
No, your applications are not just sub folders in your Application folder, at least I do not believe they are.
Click to expand...

Actually they are nothing more than a folder/file hierarchy. That said, it has nothing to with brobson's problem because she deleted data files which couldn't have been saved in the .app package - which is sort of plinden's point.
 
KD7IWP said:
No, your applications are not just sub folders in your Application folder, at least I do not believe they are.
Click to expand...
I'm right, you're wrong.

Open Terminal. Type "cd /Applications". Type "ls". Pick an application and type "cd <app name you chose>". You can drill down into the "package" as far as you want. To the file system, any app is just a directory tree.

However, if you've never used Terminal, you'll only use Finder, which interprets an app directory (due to resource information) as a "package" and displays it differently from a "folder". The show package contents option is just a way for Finder to show you the underlying directory structure.

I was at some fault for using "folder" and "directory" interchangeably. The underlying file system works with files and directories, while Finder displays folders (normally folder == directories, except for smart folders, but nevermind ...), and packages (also == directories, only with different resource information).

But back to the original question - I don't see any reason for not being able to recover individual deleted files or directories ... unless the original sectors have been overwritten.
 
kingjr3 said:
Actually they are nothing more than a folder/file hierarchy. That said, it has nothing to with brobson's problem because she deleted data files which couldn't have been saved in the .app package - which is sort of plinden's point.
Click to expand...

GarageBand documents are also packages.

Picture 2.png
 
Ok, never used GarageBand before, but I just created a GarageBand document (called My Song.band).

This turns out to be a directory called "My Song.band" containing a file called projectData and subdirectories Media and Contents. Media is empty and Contents contains a file called PkgInfo.

Then I deleted my GarageBand directory. Using Terminal, I cd'ed to ~/.Trash and the directory structure was maintained (as I expected it would).

I don't see why, if I clear my Trash, these files can't be recovered by DR2. There may be some resource information missing (for all I know), but it should be possible to recover the data at least, then a bit of screwing around in GarageBand (e.g. create a dummy project and replace the generated files with the recovered ones) might work.
 
I recovered garageband data with DR2 most tunes lost

I followed this thread and tried a number of remedies most of my tunes were lost as the original relations to data were lost.Some of recovered "my songs" still worked why I don't know. DR and garageband people had no answers. My data was deleted by apple certified tech so yes now I back up everything I cannot afford to lose. Especially before I let any stranger touch my Mac.

Still looking for that fix
Bob:cool:
 
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