Recover deleted trash Mac OS X

Yup, it happens to everyone every once in a while.  You delete something you didn’t mean to and then, in a robust environment like the Mac OS X, you empty the trash.  All is not lost IF you didn’t fill up the newly freed up space with other data.  Here are some suggestions in recovering your files – yes, it is going to be tedious and you are not going to be able to simply hit ‘undelete’ to recover your folder structure intact.

1. (Ideally) Boot from another system and attach your laptop as another drive.  If you are unable to do this, try to use the laptop as little as possible – in other words, don’t copy data onto it.  Even surfing the web saves tmp files which will render some of the files you hope to undelete/recover a challenge.
2. Attach an external storage device to save the recovered files from step #3.
3. Download one of the following – should run around $99 for personal license – ‘File Recovery 2009′ or ‘Data Rescue 3′ or ‘Phoenix Stellar.’

I tried both, ‘Phoenix Stellar’ and ‘File Recovery 2009′ and found FR2009 much faster.  It did the job though about 30% of my photos (Canon Raw cr2 files) were corrupted.  I am not sure how ‘Phoenix Stellar’ would have handled those files.  Thank God, I have a habit of taking 3 frames for most shots I take as I bracket the exposure in drive/continuous mode.

If you are a migrant from the Windows world, note that undelete/recovery will not list your directory/folder structure that you can simply restore.  You will see a listing of recoverable files by type and have to manually save them to the external storage/drive you connected in step #2.  In my case, I deleted complete iphoto libraries with several thousand pixs neatly edited and categorized.  I restored from my last backup and added the missing files recovered from the above process.

Good luck…and, backup up frequently.