Is it possible that a document (in this case an Appleworks or Movie Magic Screenwriter) can be lost forever, but it's contents somehow remain as other file types elsewhere? I have an old hard drive and I need to locate the contents of these files.

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Is it possible that a document (in this case an Appleworks or Movie Magic Screenwriter) can be lost forever, but it's contents somehow remain as other file types elsewhere? I have an old hard drive and I need to locate the contents of these files.

I have a 20 gig hard drive from a 2001 iBook. When my iBook crashed back in '04, there was a screenplay on there that was not saved anywhere else. It has tremendous sentimental value to me, and I would really like to retrieve it. I've ran some data recovery software that's uncovered a gargantuan amount of data, most of it being completely unreadable to me.

Additionally, I have found an AppleWorks file that could be the script, but it is ZERO bytes in size, and Pages won't even open it, saying that it is not a valid AppleWorks file.

So I'm curious...is it possible that the document is lost, but somehow the contents of it are somewhere else on the drive as metadata in other unreadable formats. And if that's the case, how would I go about translating the unreadable data back into something that IS readable?

Posted on Feb 12, 2015 9:21 AM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

78,704 points

Feb 12, 2015 10:21 AM in response to toddisalive

If the file in question is a text document, download the free productivity suite LibreOffice:

http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/

See if that recognizes any useable files. LibreOffice is pretty good about reading old AppleWorks files that Apple abandoned with Pages. It may not preserve formatting but the words should be there.

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Answer 2

fosnola

Level 1

126 points

Feb 12, 2015 11:59 PM in response to toddisalive

Hello,

toddisalive wrote:

Additionally, I have found an AppleWorks file that could be the script, but it is ZERO bytes in size, and Pages won't even open it, saying that it is not a valid AppleWorks file.

if the size of this file is really ZERO bytes, either the original file contained an empty data fork and a resource fork which was stored elsewhere (*) or the file is too damaged to retrieve anything. Moreover, as AppleWorks never generates file with empty data fork, at least to my knowledge, ....

Concerning the Movie Magic ScreenWriter files, the application seems to exist for Yosemite http://www.write-bros.com/movie-magic-screenwriter.html ( but it seems "expensive" and I do not know if it accepts to import old files )....

(*) maybe in .TOTO or __MACOSX/.TOTO if the filename is TOTO

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