Today I worked with a customer that had accidentally deleted most of her pictures from her Mac’s internal hard drive. She had already purchased Data Rescue, but was not sure how to get started and did not want to make things worse. She decided to contact our free support team.
I guided her in with the steps to start recovering her deleted files using Data Rescue. The first step was starting a new scan in Data Rescue, she selected her internal hard drive as the source to be scanned.
Then I directed her to choose the Deleted Files Scan as the task she would run. Then she connected her external hard drive and chose that as her workspace for the scan.
When the scan finished she opened the Reconstructed Files folder and saw that there were a lot of images that were found. She selected all of the JPEG folders for recovery and began recovering them to her external hard drive. When the recovery finished she was very happy as she was able to find most of the pictures that she had lost. She finished going through all the recovered files and is now in the process of reimporting all of her pictures back into her iPhoto library.
If you delete a file, by dragging it into the trash and then emptying it when you are on a Mac the file’s name and folder information is usually erased by the system, and is therefore irretrievably lost. However in most cases, the most important part of the file, its contents are still present on the drive.
Data Rescue enhances your ability to find deleted files in another way: the Deleted Files Scan scans only the free space portion of your mac hard drive, greatly reducing the number of files that you must look for to find particular ones.