Corruption of Documents

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I have been a Mac user since 1991 starting with a Quadra that operated on system 5.0, I think. I currently use primarily a MacBook using OS 10.6.6

Over the years there have been occasions when a saved document became corrupted and could not be opened, for reasons unknown to me. It was so infrequent however, I just accepted it. I also learned early on the value of backing up.

Over the past year or so, with increasing frequency, I have been encountering a mass corruption of all sorts of documents including those with extensions .doc, .pdf and even .txt. The corruption has spread to the same documents on my backup drives with the result that I have lost literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of documents I needed to retain for professional purposes as well as many of sentimental value.

I know MACs are highly resistant to viruses but there are some and I am wondering what else it could be. I run a virus protection program but no viruses have been revealed.

Does anyone know what could be causing this and/or how I might be able to recover those corrupted documents? Thank you for your time and assisstance.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15" 2014, 2.2GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, OSX 10.9.5 - iPhone 5s 16gb
Try repairing your drive and drive permissions.
To do this boot into your OSX DVD, go to Utilities > Disk Utility, click your HDD in the left pane, click the First Aid tab, click Repair Disk, once complete click Repair Disk Permissions. These could take a while to complete so be patient with it. Once done you can restart. This may solve the problem. Sounds more like a dying HDD but with it affecting your docs on your external drive it is a little strange.

- Simon
 
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Mac Mini (Late 2014) 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 Memory: 8GB 1600MHz DDR3
I know MACs are highly resistant to viruses but there are some and I am wondering what else it could be. I run a virus protection program but no viruses have been revealed.

Nope. it hasn't found one because there aren't any at the present time. When one comes out, you'll hear about it from every news outlet on the planet.

I doubt that those corrupted files can be revived without 1) lots of time 2) a fair amount of money 3) additional software or 4) all of the above
 
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Did the corruption happen after you upgraded from say 10.5 to 10.6? If you have TimeMachine running can you restore from an older date that may not be corrupted?

Otherwise this may turn into a major project....wish I had more to offer
 
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Down Under :D
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Back to my old 2.2GHz C2D MB after selling my MBP and wondering what my next Mac will be :)

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