A close relative of mine deleted several large files after thinking he copied them to an external drive. On Windows and Linux, dragging a file to an external drive would invoke a copy operation. For some reason his Mac OSX 10.6 seems to think that he wanted to create shortcuts instead (apparently called an alias in Cappuccino-driven Apple-land). Thinking (like an reasonable person would) that the files had copied over since he didn't get an error to the contrary, he deleted the files from his desktop. Imagine his surprise and shock when he couldn't open the files from the external drive.
Now if he were a Windows, there would be so many potential undelete programs vying for his attention, most of which are free, that he'd already be back to work on his media files. There are even several free undelete utilities for Linux (being open means more and deeper collaboration as opposed to broader competition). Alas, in the Mac world undelete utilities are few, far between, and relatively expensive.
I was able to locate a couple of viable HFS+ capable undelete utilities, one of which is on the always handy Ultimate Boot CD. So I downloaded and burned a copy. Turns out an Intel based Mac machine won't boot an ISO 9660 CD. Fine. I read about dual-bootable cd's. I'm hopeful somebody has made a Mac version of the Ultimate Boot CD for Intel Macs. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. If you make a mistake on your Mac you must pay through the nose to fix your mistake.
For a system Apple insists is better than Windows, they have utterly crap support from the amateur development community. College kids make undelete utilities for Windows in their college down-time these days. Supposedly Macs are taking over college campuses. Are these Mac users so unable to program their machines that not one bootable Mac utilities disc has been created yet?
My current remaining options appear to be a $90 bootable DVD or risk overwriting some of the deleted files by downloading and installing the one rescue program I found to the hard drive. (It's called PhotoRec if any of you Mac users want to install it ahead of any future misfortunes.
Update: I put PhotoRec on a USB key and it can be run directly from there. Now I'm just stuck waiting on a password so it can see all the other drives when it's run.
Update 2: Got the password, did a little "sudo bash" magic and ran the PhotoRec program from the USB stick. It is not dutifully scanning the drive and has recovered over 40,000 delete files (most of which are Internet cache files to be re-deleted). I'm glad I stand corrected about the lack of a free utility for OSX. I truly believe a donation to the PhotoRec developers is in order. I'll know for sure in about 18 more hours (apparently all the recovery software is known to take a very long time).
