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gauravity · May 12, 2008, 04:13 AM

Hi all,

Yesterday, I rather stupidly deleted an unfinished assignment which is due tomorrow (13/05). The file was not securely erased and my home folder is encrypted with FileVault.

I have tried Data Rescue II which is supposedly one of the best programs out there for data recovery, I was unable to find the file. The problem with Data Rescue II is it has a list of known file types. My deleted file was a Microsoft Word 2008 file with the extension docx. Data Rescue II seems to be oblivious to Microsoft Office 2008 extensions. As such, Data Rescue II just lists a lot of .doc and other Office <2008 formats. There are however .ole extensions results amongst the others, which is Object Linking and Embedding files though I'm a little weary over that. Could they be Office 2008 files?

I have also tried StellarPheonix which is supposed to be another good application, no avail.

They all seem to have some kind of list for known file extensions and don't support Office 2008.

Has anyone else experienced the same thing as I? Anyone know of any tips, solutions, ideas? Anything would be a great help.

Thanks in advance,

Gaurav

MacosNerd · May 12, 2008, 09:03 AM

I could be wrong but because of FV, you'll be unable to undelete/retrieve the deleted documents.

naphtali · May 12, 2008, 10:56 AM

Yeah that's probably it. The idea of FV is that all your home folder files are encrypted, so they can't be read in clear without the proper access procedure and password (through Mac OS X).

Good luck with the paper!

gauravity · May 12, 2008, 11:07 AM

Thank you very much for the replies guys.

Data Rescue II can actually read the encrypted sparseimage files created by FileVault. There is an option to view virtual images, if you enable that you will see <username>.sparseimage files for users with encrypted home areas. You of course need to know the password for the user to access the sparseimage file.

This topic has been made redundant now as I am currently in the process of re-writing my report. Though, should anyone have a solution it may be useful for others who may encounter this problem.