Re: Get Files out of the Trash into the right folders back
- From: dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson)
- Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:51:28 +1300
"MatthiasHager" <u40579@uwe> wrote:
i connected my external disk to the new macbook pro (Mac OS X 10.5.1)
i uses iTunes for music, opened some excel files ... etc - just worked with
the book and this disk.
then i saw in the finder the search option with different possibilities to
search for something (today, yesterday, last week, all pictures, all videos,
and all documents). and i choose "all documents" and saw a huge list with
many many files - all different, music, pictures ... everything.
and then i made the big mistake - dont ask me why i did this ... i selected
all and deleted them.
That wasn't a good idea.
bang - and then i saw that the macbook was working a short time, and this
made me nervous, because i thought these were just "alias" files and not the
originals. but they where the originals.
the second mistake was not to press "apple + z"
i looked in the trash and it was full with files ... about 8500 different
files.
Correct. If you did an Undo at this point, everything would have gone
back where it came from.
As you didn't undo, there is no way to put the files back in the correct
places, except by doing it manually.
and then i looked to the external disk - the folders were all there, every
folder - but empty.
so i just deleted the files, not the folders.
Strictly speaking, you moved the files to the trash. They haven't been
deleted until you empty the trash.
i ejected the disk and went to the pc laptop and saw three hidden files - one
was ".trashes" and one was ".Temporary Items" and one was ".Spotlight-V100"
in the .trashes folder, all the files are inside
Good. At least you can get them back again, but will have a lot of work
to rearrange them.
in the .temporary Items folder is again a folder called "folders.501" and in
this folder is nothing (in a windows machine explorer)
in the spotlight-V100 is again a folder - called "store-V1" and in this a
file called "volumeConfig.plist" and a folder called "stores"
in this stores folder is again a folder " EC16D423-4FE5-48C8-BE11-......" in
there are about 60 different files.
You can completely ignore everything which was inside the spotlight-V100
folder. That is the Spotlight search index for the volume. You can't do
anything useful with it. If you moved it elsewhere or deleted it, then
Mac OS X will recreate it the next time you connect that hard drive to a
Mac (running 10.4 or later).
so i copied this tree hidden folder, and all the things in there.
the files i throw in the trash are not lost now.
ok fine, but they are not in the folders they should be.
As a starting point, sorting the files by Kind (Type or Extension) may
help. See if you can reduce the scope of the problem by setting up new
temporary folders to store sets of files which you can identify, and use
them to group all of the unsorted mess of original files. You should
eventually be able to get all of your important files sorted out, and
may be left with other files you can't identify.
i cannot copy them each by each in back to the folder they belong to, because
there are many many files i dont know where they belong to exactly.
for example i have a lot of mp3 files titled "artist 1" ... so which artist
is it - in which folder do i have to put it.
If they were being managed by iTunes then you should be able to reload
them all back into the iTunes library.
This will be a rather time consuming process.
If you have files titled "artist 1" that probably means you hadn't
turned on the iTunes option to keep its music folder organised, as this
will rename all the files and folders with artist and track names, and
group them into folders in a structure it likes.
This will be the easiest way to sort out the mess. The catch is that it
will rename all of the music files for you. If you don't want them
renamed, then you will have to do it all by hand (though iTunes might be
able to assist by at least letting you identify what each file is).
Another point is that iTunes maintains an XML file which contains all
the data from the music library (iTunes Music Library.xml). This may
contain enough information for you to be able to identify where all the
files belong. The problem is that reading it by hand and processing all
the files will take a huge amount of effort.
timemachine i did not use at that time - so this is no solution.
also a recoveryproram i have tried out - but this just look at the empty
space if there was a file, if yes you can recover it but on a different space
(on an other disk is recommended) and not in the belonging folder.
There is no recovery software which will help.
i hope that there is a solution to this problem.
maybe each file has an "address" where it comes from ...
Nope. Once you've moved it to trash, Finder briefly remembers (in
memory) where every file came from, but if you don't use the Undo
command immediately, there is no record of where each file came from.
maybe mac makes a "historyfile" in the trash - i did not see yet.
No, sorry.
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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