So.... SWIM was REALLY DUMB today, and deleted his 12 GB collection of music from his Mac... yeah... so, he needs some sort of data recovery program for macintosh, that will restore the files. Hoping there is something free, maybe even opensource?

Can anyone help?

A quick google brings up a bunch.

Some of them have free trials and stuff, I'm sure you can find one that'd be appropriate.

Uh-huh.. true genius, I see. Iv'e spent the last two hours looking for a free program.. all I can find is freaking shareware... I can't find any serials that work (half those things are virii, anyway)... and Iv'e tried about 6 different apps already. Usually, in the evaluation version, the save option is blocked. AND YES, I used google...

I sensed that was said in a poor manner. So I'll leave you to find stuff yourself.

The first one I looked at had a fully working 3 day trial, so you're obviously not looking very hard.

If you dont want to spend some serious time finding a key for a decent software, then throwing abit of cash is the way to go.

12gb isn't that bad, but it ain't that much either so in due respect, consider downloading some new albums and dont make the same misstake twice.

Well, I suppose you sensed right. My dearest apologies.

However, the least you could have done in your last post would be to state the name of your "fully working 3 day trial" app, so I could track it down and use it.

Now, I could use a stinging remark against that and say something like: "I guess you were thinking too hard, ect." But that would simply be a waste of time, considering all YOU have time for is telling people in genuine anguish to GOOGLE IT.

-trakout

I goo-diddly-oogled it and came up with some options:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

etc

keywords: file recovery software +free

Wish i had a tried and true prog to refer you to but thus far i have not deleted my entire music library. Knock on wood.

I don't know if TestDisk supports mac filesystems, but it does support *nix file systems, and Mac is based on BSD, and it is a free/open source program.

hm... thanks, so much you guys! I've got about half my music back so far, and there's more to come! I'm SO happy!

Thanks again,

-trakout

iolo System Mechanic has advanced file recovery software that comes with it, it's not free but theres a free trial for some time, and I ain't sure if it works for Mac. All I know is that it's the best out there.

P.S: I advise you to decrease the amount of activity on your computer that's likely to create temp files or anything that will take up more free space -- because it will overwrite the space where your lost songs are located. So don't do anything (including going on totse) until you've recovered all your shit.

Anything that's missing just re-download.