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waffffffle · Jan 2, 2005, 12:31 AM

I had these .rar files of OS X icons that I downloaded onto my PC but I couldn't extract them, so I dropped them into my home folder on my Mac over SMB and then I connected to my Mac using SSH and typed "open *.rar" to open all of the .rar files in UnRarX. Well one of the files was named Library.rar and UnRarX extracted it to a folder called Library which overwrote my Library folder! All of my settings are gone! All of my currently running applications appear to not have lost their settings (and they are slowly saving pref files back to the Library folder) but all of my local emails are gone, as well as the settings for any app that wasn't running at the time. My most recent backup is a couple months old so I really want to get my data back. Is there any way to retrieve overwritten files? I feel like this is going to be biting me forever now that all these settings that I've been working on for 4 years of using OS X are all gone!

I have some disk tools (old Norton System Works and Norton Utilities) which run in 9. If I boot my PowerBook into target disk mode, can I run the tools from another Mac in OS 9 to get the lost files? Can either of those programs see overwritten files?

I am preying that I am not screwed.

wadesworld · Jan 2, 2005, 12:55 AM

I think you're screwed.

Wade

Big Mac · Jan 2, 2005, 01:57 AM

Sorry to hear that waf, but I have to concur with wadesworld's assessment. Do you have a backup?

Chuckit · Jan 2, 2005, 02:20 AM

Norton Utilities for OS 9 has a file-recovery function, but I'd sooner lose my ~/Library folder than let Norton touch my drive.

Devin Lane · Jan 2, 2005, 03:17 AM

Wow... What a horrible program. Overwrites existing directories without even asking? Even Stuffit isn't that bad.

alphasubzero949 · Jan 2, 2005, 03:23 AM

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
What a horrible program.

Agreed.

Sorry, you've pretty much lost your stuff.

Tsilou B. · Jan 2, 2005, 10:13 AM

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:
Agreed.

Sorry, you've pretty much lost your stuff.

The preferences are certainly gone - the mailboxes could be recoverable with DataRescue X, if their data is not yet overwritten. You'll have to choose a "Thorough Scan" and probably DataRescue will not display the correct filename, but it should find one or more files that contain all you emails.

waffffffle · Jan 2, 2005, 06:45 PM

I've been running Norton UnErase scans all night. Doing the most indepth scan took all night and then the program crashed doing the data recovery. I gave the program a lot more RAM (100 MB) and ran it again. It is taking forever but maybe I can find something in teh giant mess of files that it recovers.

My most recent backup of my hard drive is 5 months old. Basically I lost a good number of emails from the past 5 months (I use IMAP but I cancelled one of my accounts recently and saved down all my emails and I have it set to autoarchive all AOL emails since AOL deletes those from the server). I've also lost all of my IM logs from the past 5 months, whcih contain plenty of girls phone numbers. I'm trying to think of what other important information I could have lost. I think I may have lost some product registration codes in emails for some shareware apps that I purchased online in the past couple months. Hopefully I can get that stuff back from the authors.

My browser bookmarks and address book are luckily synced with .Mac. I just need ot make sure that the next time I boot my machine I don't let it sync automatically and overwrite everything on the .Mac server. I also need to be sure that when I first launch Mail with my old backup I don't let it connect to the servers so that I can save down whatever server emails it has cached.

Does anyone else have any ideas for what I should be doing? Thanks. Data Rescue is a little bit expensive for me and since I can't realy quantify the value of the data I've lost I think I'm going to let it go unless someone has an idea as to what else I could have lost.