[OS X TeX] Potentially OT question: recovering deleted TeXShop documents

[David Watson]

I would suggest, if recovering the data essential to your work, to  
first shut down your computer immediately.

Next either boot from an external firewire disk or some other  
recovery disk that does not use the built-in hard drive. Any writes  
to the disk, even if they are related to virtual memory use, will  
eventually overwrite the data on your disk. If you have a computer  
with an easily accessible hard disk, you might want to take the disk  
out after you have shut it down, and then use something like what is  
listed here: http://wiebetech.com/products/MacRecovery.php.  
(wiebetech seems to suggest using DR). You could also put your  
computer into Target Disk mode (firewire) if that is an option, and  
connect it to another mac.

If you can make a backup of your drive, say with "dd" from the  
command line, then you can use a simple perl script to search through  
the disk image for words that you know to be in your working  
directory files. Using file magic, you can extract most of the files  
verbatim, if they are written to disk in sequential sectors. I have  
used this technique to rescue entire jpegs from a corrupted digital  
camera memory card. Without professional tools, the limitation is in  
the file system used to store the data, as many file systems do not  
store data in sequential sectors.

On Jul 22, 2006, at 8:30 PM, Themis Matsoukas wrote:

> On Jul 22, 2006, at 1:45 PM, Jeffrey Roland wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Victor.  DR is supposed to recover ASCII files, but as far  
>> as I know I can't tell it to specifically look for them.  I  
>> recovered over 9 gigs of files yesterday, but none that I can  
>> identify as ASCII.  I think I may be out of luck on this one.
>
>
> Last year when I accidentally erased my entire working folder (yes,  
> unbelievably foolish accidents can happen to good people...), I was  
> told that it is not possible to recover deleted files in unix-based  
> systems. I cannot vouch for the technical accuracy of this  
> statement but since then I backup daily.
>
> Themis
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