Need Advice from MAC Users: Freeware Data Recovery

Pontiac | 6/28/2010 | Pontiac

[Pontiac]

My wife reset her digital camera with her memory card installed.

The camera reformatted the memory card in the process.

Now I am looking for Free or cheap data recovery software for my Power MAC running OS 10.4.11 with 8 gig of RAM

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Pontiac]

Money is tight I can't afford much

[Pontiac]

Ping

[RightOnline]

Try this one:

http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/download-mac-data-recovery.php

[E. Pluribus Unum]

If you are trying to recover the files on the memory card, you can do it from a PC using File Scavenger.

[svcw]

I asked my husband and his response "that's not good". Found this on goolge: http://www.cardrecovery.com/os.asp

Zero idea if it works.

[Pontiac]

Thanks

I’ll have a look.

Have you used it?

[Pontiac]

My PC is a dog of a relic

That’s why I use the MAC for most everything

[Pontiac]

Thanks, I’ll have a look

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Might be good enough for this task.

[RetroSexual]

Sandisk, Lexar and other memory card manufacturers package recovery software with their cards. I'd recommend:

• Don't do ANYTHING further to the card (the data is still on there unless you actually overwrote it. The only thing that formatting did was to remove index pointers to the image files).
• Go to the manufacturer's website and see if you can download their recovery software. For example, Lexar offers a download of their Image Rescue product.

Good luck!

[Pontiac]

Thanks, I will go check it out.

[Pontiac]

Trial version did not find any files.

[Afisra]

Photorescue does a good job of rescuing files from a flash card. It’ll even recover formatted cards as long as nothing else was written to it.

[Logical me]

Cheapest way I know is to purchase a reasonable external hard drive. Then by purchasing SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner back up your entire system including files. Make sure you back up as a bootable copy. This would require all applications and ALL of your files are on your main internal hard drive. (Crazy as it may seem I have a second internal hard drive and an external hard drive with my entire system backed up and bootable.) Your best security system is right at home on your computer. I’ve been with Apple since the IIC series with the little green screen, lot of water under the bridge. Lots of other way but this is the cheapest I know.

[Pontiac]

Well you are my wife’s hero.

The Lexar Image Rescue found the files.

$36 is worth it to get her grandson’s baby pictures back.

She does drive me nuts. She had about 300 pictures on the card.

Why she does not down load the pictures occasionally is a mystery.

She sits and plays solitaire for hours on the computer and could be down loading at the same time.

Well I am going to burn them to a CD while I am at it.

Thanks again.

[RetroSexual]

Happy to help!

On a Mac (as I am) you can set up Time Machine to constantly back up your files to a cheap external drive. I trust it with a couple terabytes of image data, as I am a professional photographer.

[Pontiac]

I have a 300 gig external drive that I back up to manually periodically.

Thankfully I have never needed to use it to recover files.

[Borderline]

"On a Mac (as I am) you can set up Time Machine to constantly back up your files to a cheap external drive. I trust it with a couple terabytes of image data, as I am a professional photographer."

I would not put a huge amount of trust in Time Machine. Not to bash Apple, I have a computer storage business that is mostly based on Mac users. Our experience has been that Time Machine just rates OK for general backups of relatively small and not very dynamic databases.

We talk with users every week who have issues with TM backups failing. Time Machine tries to be everything, but comes up short in a few places.

TM creates a proprietary database out of the backup data. This database must be recovered from/converted back to even verify the veracity of the backup. A small corruption and the database becomes unusable by the user.

The TM backup database gets bigger and bigger. I find this particularly true for photographers. If the photographer does a lot of editing then the database grows by leaps and bounds.

We tested TM in house on 11 Macs. We failed every last backup within 10 months. They all failed in seemingly different fashion.

One of them, the computer would not run while TM was doing an update. This was the accountants machine, so everything came to a stop while she waited.

Mine, the backup said it was happening every couple hours, but when I tried to make a recovery of a mail item I had deleted, the recover button would not 'do' anything. It was dead.

Another, the TM backups would state they were being made, but the latest backup data was from months earlier.

And so on........ every last one failed. All within 10 months. The test was done as a third backup, so no fuss.

We found a couple things can make TM work and a few situations work well. One thing users can do is erase and start the TM backup process over fresh every few months. Seems that a big part of the problem is as the backup database gets more and more complex it becomes more likely to be corrupted. Erasing the TM backup drive(s) and starting fresh on a regular schedule resolves that issue.

'Light' computer users will usually be able to run for quite some time without problem. 'Light user' being the polar opposite of 'pro photographer'. Backing up a bit of email, system changes and the handful of pictures received from family and friends is pretty low impact on the database.

Pro photographers should backup their large (and always growing) database separate from their system and general purpose drive(s). That photo data backup should be an automated clone, an exact duplicate, of the database drive(s). Veracity of the cloned backup can be easily checked and maintained and additional offsite clones made and kept current with ease. TM will work fine backing up your OS, applicaitons and Users drives - less the photo database - as long as the TM drive is erased and started over occasionally. The database needs to be backed up on its own merits.

Just having a backup is all too rare! I do not mean to demean anyone's backup plan. Having one is half the battle. I do photo storage, all day, for a living, and have a few opinions. My apologies if I get carried away expressing them.

[Grumplestiltskin]

“I would not put a huge amount of trust in Time Machine. Not to bash Apple, I have a computer storage business that is mostly based on Mac users. Our experience has been that Time Machine just rates OK for general backups of relatively small and not very dynamic databases.

We talk with users every week who have issues with TM backups failing. Time Machine tries to be everything, but comes up short in a few places”

I would like to second the comments that Borderline wrote.

If you are a home Mac user, and you are reading this, I strongly advise you to jettison Time Machine and get with a real backup strategy that you can rely on in an “extreme moment of need”.

You can create a real, bootable backup using either the freeware “CarbonCopyCloner” or the shareware “SuperDuper!”. Even SD lets you do a “full clone” for free — you only pay the shareware fee to access its more advanced features.

Either of the above will create a bootable, Finder-copyable “clone” of your source volume. For example, if your current internal hard drive is one partition (probably the norm for the vast majority of home users), you can use CCC or SD to “dupe it” to an external drive at regular intervals. The external will then look EXACTLY like your internal, and behave as such. If something goes wrong with the internal drive, you can boot from the backup and it will look “as your internal did” the last time you backed up.

YOU CAN’T DO THAT IF YOU’RE USING TIME MACHINE TO BACKUP (shouting very intentional). Time Machine backups ARE NOT bootable. They waste disk space, copying the same files over and over and over and over. And I have seen numerous reports from users who — in a moment of need — tried to access their TM backups, and.... couldn’t.

TM is a half-baked idea from Apple that [to end users who don’t know much, or care much, about “backing up”] “makes backing up easy”. Well, OK. TM _does_ make it easy to write the backup data. The problem with TM is, it can be difficult to “get at” that data sometimes.

Again, if you’re a Mac user, and care about protecting the data you have, you need at least one “bootable clone” of your internal drive. Even for doing some maintenence, it becomes very handy to have around.

By the way, if you don’t yet have an external drive, I’d like to make some more suggestions:
You don’t have to buy an “already-packaged” drive, in fact, I recommend that you do not. Instead, get something like this (various items shown):
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0

The one I got for myself is this:
http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Connecland-CL-ENC50013-Docking-Station/dp/B002BXG36O/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253062702&sr=1-22

Then, buy one (or even two) “bare drives” from a place like newegg.com. I happen to like Seagates right now.

Then, set up your USB/SATA docking station, put the drive in, inititialize it, and do a “clone” using CCC or SD. The _first time_ always takes longer, because you are backing up EVERYthing. Subsequent backups can be “incremental”, and will go much more quickly.

When you’re done, do a “test boot”, just to be sure:
- Restart the Mac
- As soon as you hear the chimes, hold down the Option key and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN
- In a few moments, the “startup manager” will appear
- Use the arrow or tab keys to select the external drive as your startup, then hit return or enter
- You should boot from the newly cloned external (you ALWAYS want to “test your clones”)

If you have a second bare drive, repeat your clone process (from the original internal). Find somewhere “offsite” (away from where the computer is) to keep it. If you don’t have anywhere else other than home to store it, even a small waterproof/fire-resistant safe kept in the basement is better that nothing.

Long post, but hope this helps....

[RetroSexual]

Thanks for both of your inputs.

I’ve been pretty happy with Time Machine but must admit that I’ve never used it to recover from either a hard drive crash or a corrupted file system. In the year or so that I’ve been using it I’ve recovered files which were mistakenly deleted a few times, and everything seemed to be in order.

I have restarted a new TM backup a couple of times. In fact there’s one complete backup running right now (it’s been going since yesterday) which should give me a discreet 100% backup of all files. Well, if it works as advertised.

I’m paranoid, so I keep backup drives of important data too. You guys have enhanced my paranoia, so I’ll start-a-copyin’ again!