Whoops.

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I think most of you know that I got Gretch an iMac for her birthday (and just about every other holiday/anniversary/etc for the next century...)

She loves her Mac and continues to point out how wonderful it is. I agree. For the most part. Of course, I'm sure I could get an equally amazing PC desktop, but I wanted a notebook computer. Hence the reason I use my awesome Lenovo ThinkPad. But I digress...

Anyway, this evening we discovered a terrible flaw in Mac OS X. Unless someone out there in the Internet knows how to fix this... The flaw is this: if you try to merge one folder with another, you lose everything that was in the latter. Gretch had some really important documents that we use for Simply Spotless in one folder on her desktop. And she had a few other documents on one of her flash drives, also for Simply Spotless. Both folders were cleverly named "Simply Spotless". So folder from the flash drive gets moved to folder on the desktop and *poof* all the documents in the desktop folder were replaced with the ones on the flash drive.

"What's the problem?" you ask? Well, there were files on the desktop folder that were not on the flash drive. And instead of pushing those aside and just adding the other files, OS X deleted everything from the desktop folder.

Whoops.

We're now looking for a program that will recover the files. Any suggestions, Mac users?

(And to PC users: Sorry, but telling her to use a PC isn't really going to help us out here...)

Comments

cldmt_chick said…
Alex that problem is not just a Mac problem. I've had that problem with PCs as well. What I have found is that you need to name the second file a different name (i.e. add a number to the end of the original file name). Once the file is transferred from the jump drive to the hard drive then work at merging the two files. I would keep a copy of the file on the jump drive just in case things go hay wire.
April 1, 2009 at 12:59 AM
Beth Blair said…
yep. I had that problem on my PC as well. Is there a system restore feature on the Mac OS that could bring the files from the desktop back?
April 1, 2009 at 7:36 PM
Unknown said…
I don't have any experience in that kind of thing for Mac OS, but here's a link that may help: http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/334882/undelete-in-mac-os-x/

This turned up in a google search on Mac OS X Undelete. Some of the other links returned from google may also be helpful for you, it looks like some of them may even be free software. Free is good.
April 5, 2009 at 2:53 PM
Bookslinger said…
I know this is closing the barn door after the horse ran off, but next time, don't move a folder on top of a folder, but drill down one level in the source folder, and "grab" the source files (the ones on the flashdrive) themselves, and copy those into (inside of) the destination folder.

I'm coming from a Windows background, but I think the concept would carry over to the Mac.

BTW, thanks for the link to my blog.
April 9, 2009 at 11:23 AM
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