Accidentally deleted my 5 years of works please help 😭

Oh, and one more long-shot possibility: Just as with the unwitting Time Machine backups, sometimes people have auto-backup enabled with their Apple ID "iCloud Drive," without even knowing that data from their computer is being backed up to their iCloud account. Again, this is not likely to be happening, but there's a slim chance it could be. So -- if you know your Apple ID log in, trying accessing your iCloud Drive from a different computer, to see if any files are backed up there.

5 years of work not that important to you if you weren't backing up your data.

You may have to employ a professional software recovery firm, that will cost you.

Even then there is no guarantee they will be able to recover anything.

If you did not completely delete the old user account by choosing the archive option, then the old user account should be stored within the "/Users" folder in a .dmg or .sparsebundle file.

If you are using an SSD and you deleted the old user account/folder, then your data is permanently gone if you had no backup due to the way SSDs work.

If you were using a hard drive, then stop using the computer immediately so you don't overwrite the data you are looking to recover. Then contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers.

In the future make sure to have frequent and regular backups.

I'm no expert, but to summarize what you should do:

-- First, determine whether your computer has a hard drive (like a desktop iMac or an older MacBook), or has a flash-drive-style data storage (like a new Air). If it has a hard drive, then STOP using the computer immediately, because everything you do causes data to be written to the hard drive, and you might be overwriting your old data. Turn off the computer and use a completely different computer to continue your search for answers. If instead your comouter has a flash drive, then it's not so much of a problem (unfortunately because the data is already unrecoverable).

-- Perhaps the only action you should do before turning off the computer is go to the "/Users" folder, and look for a file with a ".dmg" or ".sparsebundle" suffix that seems to have the same name as your lost User account. If you can find it, you might be in luck.

-- Contact any of the data-recovery firms mentioned above, or any other one near you, and tell them what happened, and ask for an estimate. If you can afford it and the price seems reasonable, hire them to try to recover the data. If they seem overpriced, try contacting a few others until you find a company you like.

-- Sometimes people have a "Time Machine" auto-backup happening to their home router, without them even realizing that this is occurring, because it is the default setting when you first plugged in your AirPort. This is unlikely, but it's a possibility, so (using a different computer) see if there is a hidden backup that you didn't even know about.

Good luck!

thebanduu wrote:

The things is there is no backup 😭

By some remote chance or luck do you have Time Machine turned on but no backup disk was ever configured? If so, your Mac may have saved "snapshots" on the internal drive of the files it was waiting to back up. These snapshots get deleted after some time so they are temporary, but if any exist, you might be able to restore from the snapshots.

Glad to be of help! What a relief. I really felt your pain, so I tried to help in any way I could think of, even though I am no expert.

The same thing happened to me wayyyy back in the 1990s when I foolishly plugged in an unfmiliar SCSI external drive to my old Mac -- and it had the same "SCSI ID #" as my internal hard drive, which caused all the data on my internal drive to disappear. (Luckily, that old "SCSI" way of connecting drives no longer exists.) Ten years' worth of work at least, poof. I was ultimately able to "recover" the data, but not as files -- only as "blocks" of bytes on the drive, which generally did not conform to how my files were organized. It took me three months to laboriously reconstruct all of my files, bit by bit, byte by byte, piecing them together from the raw material contained in the "blocks." It was a nightmare that still haunts me -- though it was better than losing everything forever. Glad you didn't have to go through the same thing!

Restore from your backup.

🙂👍