You're my last hope Obi Won

January 17, 2007 10:45 AM

OSXfilter: Accidental overwrite of various account files. Can recovery be done?

I did a bad, bad thing. In the process of trying to clear out accounts I overwrote the files of one user to another. Unfortunately, I thought I was transferring the one with all the files and data to another account. The files included the desktop, documents and library. Now everything is empty.

Is there a way to recover the data? I looked at hidden files and the invisble trash folders but no dice. Would really like all the data back.

posted by jadepearl to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: I'm on OsX 10.3 working with a G4 so the Time Machine feature is not a possibility.
posted by jadepearl at 12:38 PM on January 17, 2007

As WCityMike says, this is the hardest way to learn to do backups. I had a similar scare last summer (thankfully, I managed to save everything) but it really scared me.

I can't agree with him more on the external FireWire drive + SuperDuper. I got a LaCie d2 250G drive, and did a bootable partition and a scratch partition for Photoshop work. Life is much better now.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:43 PM on January 17, 2007

Have you tried an undelete utility?

I also learned this quirk of OS X, coming from Windows, where dropping a folder onto another with the same name won't merge the files, but rather kills the old one and its contents.
posted by mphuie at 1:44 AM on January 18, 2007

Response by poster: I was not sure if undelete programs would work in consideration that an overwrite had occurred. I went about and went through all hidden files in the hope that autosaved material could be found in addition to all trash files too.
posted by jadepearl at 3:59 AM on January 18, 2007