[tujaded]

Yikes; need massive help!

Much appreciation to anyone who can offer suggestions or solutions - PLEASE, please! I will be ever so grateful & thankful to anyone who can offer suggestions or solutions - PLEASE, please! These are all the images of my work.


I was running out of space on my 80GB Hard Drive and decided to move Pictures folder (users/myname/pictures) to my extended 300GB drive (which has been online and functioning flawlessly) and was moving items a sub-folder at a time.

When I realized that my iPhoto Library folder (~18 GB) was in this folder (I stupidly assumed it was not) I clicked on the 'X' stop key and kept getting the message on the task display window "copy in progress" alternately with "stop copy" ...until it was evident Finder was locked up.

I could see that a few of the sub-folders within the iPhoto Library folder had been moved. I then forced quit the Finder when it hung and spun for quite a while.

I intended to go back to my original drive and copy back to the exact same location the few folders that had moved to the new 300GB drive. But I found the ORIGINAL iPhoto Library folder was gone. NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.

I have been searching for a number of hours. No luck. Hubby tried also for hours, he had hoped it was in the 'virtual' users / swap file? but no.

I had intentionally not rebooted to avoid any possible deletion - although I never deleted any files.

The space on my original HD is the same as if I hadn't moved OR LOST any folders today. Nothing in the trash. Nothing in other random folders. iPhoto cannot find it's own library by default and does not recognize the (beginnings) of the new copy of the iPhoto Library folder on the new 300GB HD as valid.

I KNOW the folder must be here somewhere - it seems to have gone invisible - due to the locking up of the Finder while trying to complete the Move (which executes as a copy first then a move). Drive space on either drive has not significantly changed.

Of course I desperately need these images as much as anyone needs their files. I have a backup of iPhoto when we installed the new HD - but that was a couple months ago. Major loss.

THANKS for any help?!?!?!

I Realize i made at least a couple mistakes:

*Unwittingly & haphazardly relocating my iPhoto Library -especially without a plan
*spas-ing out the file move and finder locking up and force quitting the finder

I Realize i made at least a couple mistakes:

*Unwittingly & haphazardly relocating my iPhoto Library -especially without a plan
*spas-ing out the file move and finder locking up and force quitting the finder

**File Vault is ON. I am hoping to clear at least another 2 GB of files to turn it off in the meantime

*The largest file (at least over the size of 17 GB which is approx the size of my iPhoto Library) on my hard drive is username.sparseimage = 56 GB

*Under my apple menu in /Recent Items In /Documents is the item iPhoto Library - it will not respond and I know it is probably the item that has gone missing. I am unable to get any info on it. But is this possibly a Link file that may have info??

SYS INFO:

Mac OS X (10.4.7)
File Vault is ON. I am hoping to clear at least another 2 GB of files to turn it off in the meantime

MacMini 1.42 GHZ Power PC G4 (1.2)
1 GB DDR SDRAM
PowerMac 10,1
80 GB Internal HD
300 GB Extended HD
LS = 512K; Bus = 167;
Boot ROM = 4.8.9f1

[Emmerac]

This is a tough one. It sounds like the space on your hard disk has been marked for overwriting, and I don't know of any free solutions so you will probably have to spend some money. First, if your files are so important that if you lose them it will cost you money, then I suggest that you weigh the cost of bringing your hard drive to a professional that can recover the files for you and spending the money to buy software so you can do it yourself.

If you opt to do it yourself here is what I suggest. Since the space is marked for overwriting on your hard drive, your MUST stop using the computer immediately. If you don't then you risk having your files overwriten by something else. Next you simply need to install file recovery software on your computer and have it search for the file fragments on your drive. I sugest FileSalvage from SubRosaSoft, although your have many options if your were to search google.

FileSalvage:
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftwa...&products_id=1

Google Search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mac%2...ata%20recovery

Good Luck!

[tujaded]

Thank you - greatly - for your reply. I agree with what you said and have long since quit working on the machine...er, except for this post. I have purchased disk warrior. But right now i am going to get filesalvage and run that pronto!

Do you think this in any way has to do with filevault on my sourceimage? i don't even want to clear the additional space needed to turn it off however, fearing i might overwrite something - everything. any thoughts on this will be much appreciated.

thanks

[Emmerac]

A lot of people have reported problems with FileVault and corrupt files. You should be able to recover files from the directory as with any other directory. Make sure you do not opt to "compact" you Home directory as OS X often asks when you shut down. Also, as you mentioned, do not turn it off until you have exhausted all attempts and decide to reformat.

Best of Luck!

[tujaded]

I wanted to post a follow-up. I have been trying since i last posted to do anything to revover my files. I invested in the following three apps: Disk Warrior; File Salvage & Data Rescue II.

I suprisingly had NO success with Disk Warrior (when i was doing support for a graphics studio running OS 9.x and G3's it was the software of first choice); File Salvage gave me a little hope and recovered **some** files but they had begun to be overwritten.

I tried Data Rescue II (ProSoft), initially it seemed really thorough and did some recovery, but was not too impressive - BUT then i was determined to run it again and mount all my sparseimages and virtual drives/images. I HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY CHECKED THE OPTION TO MOUNT VIRTUAL DEVICES. I was surprised to see it registering TWO sparseimages/virtual images on my main hard drive (physically impossible - as i only have a 74 GB capacity and both said they were 54 GB each).

So it ran, ran, ran and after a few hours I looked through the results to select what i wanted (a nice feature instead of having to accept all files to recover) and VIOLA!! Every single one of my images were held in this virtual state? I still don't understand it - but all 18 +GB of data - over 65 folders with 1000 images in each - were recovered, intact!!

UNBELIEVABLE!! I never expected to regain this much data. OMG. Well worth the investment in the software (which BTW I did the online download with the bootable CD mailed to me). So if you have good advice ;-) and can afford the software options (just under $300 total - but maybe just look at Data Rescue II - and a lot of patience; i *can* be done!!!

Hopefully this may offer some hope for those in the future who do stupid things like i did. Thanks for your reply.

~holly

[VegasACF]

This is wonderful news, both for you and for those of us who have accidently done things along these lines, or will do so in the future.

Thank you ever so much for posting your results!