I had a 4.2 GB video (made in iMovie) that I was trying to send to iDVD, however, because of all the weird complications with Macs assuming you want to copy a file rather than move it, I decided to put it in the trash folder, so I could move (and not copy) it out of there...seemed logical at the time. However, I realized I couldn't get it out, so I locked it, which is supposed to protect the file from being deleted, and emptied the trash. Now all I have are 393KB of a movie I can't even open. Obviously, something of the file is still there, but is there any way to restore the complete file? Is it necessary to buy some sort of file retrieving software?


Btw, it's on a PowerBook G4.

That sounds just plain scary to me. There are better ways of doing it.

That's the worst thing you could have done. Why not just avoid emptying the trash until you found a way to rescue it? Are you really that short of disk space?

Yeah.

Next time you need to move a file, consider holding down the Command (Apple) key as an alternative to just throwing it away.

It would've been good to know the apple key trick before all this...and yes, I had 4 GB left, and even though the video was 4.2, that .2 was what got me. What restoring software would you recommend? And how successful do you think it will be?

I'd suggest having more free space on your hard disk. Not only is it living on the edge, your Mac's performance drops dramatically when you take away its free space (which it uses for virtual memory/swap space).

>What restoring software would you recommend?
I don't have any experience with hard disk recovery, although I've heard that Data Recovery Mac is supposed to be a fairly decent tool. As you'll notice, it isn't cheap -- you had better really want that file.

>And how successful do you think it will be?
Depending on how much hard disk activity has happened since you deleted the file, I'd say your chances are fairly good of recovering it. But before you do that, you will definitely need to go out and buy another hard disk, or free up your existing one. The space it takes to install a hard disk recovery program will leave little room for the recovered file.