Help! How can a person recover lost files in Mac?

[coffeeFreak]

My daughter is working on completing her Master's Thesis, but to her great dismay she has somehow lost a file on her Mac with a LOT of her work on it. She has done all the standard searches but it appears to be permanently deleted. She has also tried a couple "free" Mac recovery programs, but in order to actually recover the data you must pay a fee.

Does anyone know of a "free" data recovery program for Macs that actually lets you recover the data at no cost? Or can you suggest someone in Armstrong or Vernon who can help her for a very reasonable fee as she is a "starving student".

Thanks!

[GordonH]

My daughter is working on completing her Master's Thesis, but to her great dismay she has somehow lost a file on her Mac with a LOT of her work on it. She has done all the standard searches but it appears to be permanently deleted. She has also tried a couple "free" Mac recovery programs, but in order to actually recover the data you must pay a fee.

Does anyone know of a "free" data recovery program for Macs that actually lets you recover the data at no cost? Or can you suggest someone in Armstrong or Vernon who can help her for a very reasonable fee as she is a "starving student".

Thanks!

I've never had any of my files go missing, I have foolishly *blanked* up and somehow deleted a file by mistake. I regularly backup my computer via time machine.

So were did she save the file, was it in Documents or on Desktop.... I assume she did a search using Spotlight (using a line from the document).
Another place she could try is opening Finder a window will open then on left side click on All My Files

I will check back some time in the morning

[coffeeFreak]

Thanks GordanH for responding! She ended up paying to retrieve and got everything back except for her "pages" doc which is the word processing program in a Mac. Unfortunately she had done a lot of writing and organising of the transcriptions and research etc in that "page" but she has resigned herself to rewrite it.

Like she says: "I know better and should have emailed what I had to myself; but you can be sure it will never happen again!"

[rekabis]

I would also look into an online back up service such as CrashPlan. If your family has at least six computers across all family members, you can run with the family pack with allows you to attach up to 10 computers. Otherwise with less than six computers get the per-computer subscription. I hate subscriptions but I gladly pay for this one -- the amount of backup is unlimited and I already have quite a few terabytes of data backed up. It can easily save your *bleep* when you accidentally delete something or your computer gets broken or stolen. As long as you secure the program itself with a password no-one else can retrieve or muck around with your backed up data.

Feel free to PM me if you want to know more, not much on Castanet anymore but my meatworld profile is readily doxxable from my username.

[mexi cali]

I know this is a very simplistic approach and I am not taking a shot at your daughter because hey, been there, done that but I have a dedicated flash drive for any work I do regarding publisher docs, word or excel and I regularly save a copy to that as well as regularly hitting save while I am working on it.

I am fairly paranoid about losing work as some of the projects I have on the go span many months and in some cases years of adding in data. I also have an external hard drive permanently attached to my main desktop that is set to backup once each day but it can be set to do it hourly I think.

You can't be too careful or save too many times.

Glad she got the meat back.

[Bsuds]

Keep a copy of files that I use all the time on Dropbox. Not only will they always be there but I can access them from any computer.

[coffeeFreak]

Thanks Folks! I think she got just a bit too comfortable with how reliable her Mac is at saving but I am sure she will no longer take this approach, or at least I hope not.

A few years ago I was in the Okanagan College library during one of the crunch deadline times when the power went out. There were many painful groans and the air was thick with 'f' bombs...there were even a few tears from those who hadn't saved any part of their research papers. I felt bad for them, but on the other hand I hoped they learned a very valuable lesson that day: SAVE, SAVE, SAVE, BACKUP!

[forum]

Unsaved work during a power outage + Practice and reflection period

[Partmanpartfish]

Did she check her iCloud account? My macbook backs up all of my Pages docs to iCloud.

[Caberry98]

Did she check her iCloud account? My macbook backs up all of my Pages docs to iCloud.

Did she saved onto iCloud account? If yes, then there is a backup.