UNDO REPLACE FOLDER

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Level 1

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UNDO REPLACE FOLDER

This morning I was moving some files about and accidentally moved a small itunes music folder (10GB) into a folder on my external hard drive titled the same... 'itunes music' This is my back up music folder with maybe 50GB of tunes on it....

problem is when prompted that a folder already existed with that name do you want to replace I accidentally hit YES. Dang! Oops. I hit cancel too late and it seems I have erased the 50GB of music from the drive....

thing is I know it is still there... just flagged for erasure..... is there anyway I can retrieve the folder I replaced?

Powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Dec 21, 2005 1:47 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 21, 2005 2:24 PM in response to Benjamin c

Dragging a file to the Trash is one thing, but when you replace a file with another the replaced file cannot be recovered because it has been overwritten. Replacing a file or folder does not "flag" anything for erasure, it overwrites the replaced file completely on the hard drive.

Because the folder you replaced is larger than the folder it was replaced with, you may be able to recover part of the data that was not overwritten. However, it's important that you not attempt to write any more data to the drive lest you overwrite the data that's still possibly recoverable.

You will need to use software such as Data Rescue II (www.prosofteng.com) or File Salvage (www.subrosasoft.com) in order to recover anything, if it's recoverable.

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