A couple years ago (January 2007, I think), as a young and foolish person, I was having some trouble with my then-six-year-old Mac G4 - something to do with quitting applications at random, I think, and a friend who had formerly done minor tech support recommended that I reinstall the OS. I did, it succeeded, and restarted with two sets of the directories displayed in the sidebar (Desktop, Music, Applications, etc.) - one in the sidebar and one under the hard-drive, in a slightly harder to get to location. The sidebar versions were all empty, wheras those on the hard-drive contained all of my documents &c.
I somewhat foolishly relocated all of the ones on the harddrive back to where they'd previously been - in the sidebar - and then shut the computer down and left town for a couple days. When I came back and restarted, all of my files were gone, at which point a bit of wailing and complaining ensued, but not too much. All of the really major things had been stored on a back-up drive, and since I was at the time still in high school, I could use my parents' machines for schoolwork and so forth, although neither of them had room for me to transfer the backup info onto their computer, so I figured I could just wait.
Then a month later, before I'd gotten my new computer, the backup crashed and wiped everything, whereupon I threw up my hands and declared loudly that I didn't care about anything that had been on the poor dead computer. This was not entirely true, but is certainly sustainably so; although it did represent about six years of my life, they were a fairly youthful six years, so it could be worse.
However. Lately, I've been mildly curious as to whether I could get back several of the more important documents, so therefore have been messing around with Disc Warrioring around and Firewiring the dead machine up to my current one and so forth. Disc Warrior claims that all files are intact, and Firewire shows exactly what I'd expected - the sidebar things intact but empty, with no files modified between May 2003 and January 2007.
I thought that was that, all doomed, etc, but some meandering around the internet suggests that I'm not necessarily correct: because I didn't touch the dead computer at all after it showed up dead, not even to try to get my files off (until a couple days ago, at which point only through firewire and disc warrior), it's been suggested to me that there might be a way to get at my missing data. I don't know if I've provided enough information for anyone to answer me, and if it's possible, I have even less idea how to go about retrieving it, but there are a number of things on that computer that I'd really like to get back, seventeen-year-old grand declarations notwithstanding, so I thought I might ask. So, er. Any ideas?
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