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20031110 Monday November 10, 2003

Need to recover deleted files on OS X OK, I'm an idiot. I had a symlink in /Users/mraible/Sites that pointed to my application's prototype directory. This was called Sites/appname -> /Users/mraible/dev/appname/prototype. I wanted to change the symlink, and instead of doing "rm appname" - I did "rm -r appname/" - I tabbed-completed it and hit return. So I deleted all the files for the prototype I've been developing. The worst part? My new gig has not set me up with VPN Access (for CVS), so I haven't checked in any of these files. I work from home on Friday and Mondays - and I was just beginning the prototype on Thursday. I thought I'd be able to get the HTML files from the prototype directory, but no luck yet. I have DiskWarrior and when I boot from my iPod and "repair" my hard drive - I get errors at the end and I can't "Preview" the changes. I don't even know if DiskWarrior will work, so I downloaded Virtual Lab and tried it. It doesn't seem to have a setting for HTML files (except for "Microsoft Internet Explorer HTML", which is probably *.htm files).

Even more frustrating is I "should've" had a backup. I just got on a kick last night to make backups of all my machines. I was able to backup Linux (using tar) just fine, but the "Backup" program on OS X kept giving me errors and I gave up after a while. I continue to search for a solution to recover the deleted files - any advice appreciated.

Update: I found the file I spent the most time developing and was able to restore it. How? Certainly not any fancy tools. Just a little searching in Safari's Cache. Apparently it was the only one I opened via an http:// URL - the others I opened with file:// and I don't think it caches those. Posted in Mac OS X at Nov 10 2003, 07:03:01 PM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

The most primative of backup systems would be archiving gnutar onto cd. No excuses it's so easy under OSX.

Posted by Robert Nicholson on November 11, 2003 at 10:51 AM MST #

Same thing happened to me today.

Posted by Eddy Young on November 11, 2003 at 03:21 PM MST #

<shameless plug> Have you thought about a remote backup service? We provide this service. It is written in Java and runs beautiful on OS X, Linux, and another platform. You can always signup for a free trial! Also, we *love* feedback. </shameless plug>

Posted by Matthew Porter on November 16, 2003 at 03:31 PM MST #

Yes, that was a shameless plug.

Posted by Matthew Porter on November 16, 2003 at 03:32 PM MST #

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