[ShotgunEd]

Very accusatory title I know, I'm posting on behalf of a friend, post up if you've seen this before or know a solution.

My pal is in the middle of his dissertation and had a 6000 word Microsoft Word document in a folder in his own user's desktop folder

(~/Desktop/SomeFolderName/ValuableDocument.doc).

This document was not backed up.

He installed the 10.3.9 update and when he rebooted the folder that was on the desktop before the update had disappeared. He's done various finds, tried the 'Recent' Apple Menu item and tried the recent documents thingie in Word but to no avail. Has the update created a new ~/Desktop/ folder and replaced the original leaving his work lost? Or can anyone think of somewhere this may have been moved?

Thanks in advance.
Ross.

[MarkLT1]

Being in the middle of my dissertation as well...

Tell him to STOP using his laptop immediately. Get it into his universities IT dept. They should have a something like disk warrior, which has a "deleted files" recovery tool on a CD. They boot from the CD, and can attempt to recover the file.

However, the more he uses the computer, the greater the chance that the sectors containing his paper, will be overwritten, so have him shut it off, and get it in.

Then get a suitable backup system going. I had all of the research for my PhD work (2 years worth) un-backed up on a laptop, when a glass of wine was dumped on it. Luckily I was able to recover it all, and now I have a local, on the machine backup (for instances like the one your friend is experiencing), a backup done nightly to my linux box in my apartment, and a backup done nightly offsite to my office machine.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by ShotgunEd

My pal is in the middle of his dissertation and had a 6000 word Microsoft Word document in a folder in his own user's desktop folder

(~/Desktop/SomeFolderName/ValuableDocument.doc).

This document was not backed up.

Ouch. That is an unbelievable disrespect for one's own work.

Your friend should not use or touch his computer any more. No experiments, no nothing. He needs to send the disk to a professional data recovery service.

[chris v]

Why does it always take an episode like this to make people realize the value of good backups? A blank CD costs 30 cents.

[ShotgunEd]

Thanks for the prompt reply guys. Unfortunately his Uni, QUB in Belfast doesn't have ANY macs so getting Diskwarrior off them isn't an option. I think I know someone who has it so I'll direct him that way. I just wasn't sure what OSX apps had the Unerase/Undelete functionality that Norton took care of so well under OS9.

If he can't get it I guess he'll be spending the next 3 days typing.

Is this a well known bug related to 10.3.9 or just a freak thing that sometimes happens with updates? I never keep anything too significant on my desktop so I can't say I've ever noticed this type of thing happen with an incremental update.

Thanks again folks.

[chris v]

Directories can corrupt at any time, for a number of different reasons. I ran a minor update (10.2.1 to 10.2.2, I think) a while ago that, when the machine rebooted, appeared to have wiped my applications folder. I shut down immediately, ran DiskWarrior, which fixed the corrupt directory, and I was back in business.

That said, a good (read: not made by Norton) un-erase tool would be nice, though who knows if it would work in a directory corruption scenario, which is most likely what has happened to your friend.

Edit: I don't think that with OS X, the desktop is any more susceptible to corruption than any other folder, since it's really just a normal folder, now.