Desperate- think I lost my wedding photos and all files ;(

Hi Everyone,

I posted this on the mac support site but also wanted to post it here since I'm desperate for any help.

Hoping for a hail mary here. It appears that I've really screwed up and lost all the files on my Wife's computer, including wedding photos

Sorry for the long story, but wanted to provide as much detail as possible in hopes that someone might be able to help.

My wife has an iMac that was running 10.5. We got a new printer that needed new software to run, so I purchased Snow Leopard. Before doing so, I made the first and only Time Machine backup that was ever made for this computer to my Seagate 3TB cloud storage device in our house. I then installed snow leopard and everything was in tact.

However, the computer ran VERY slow and was almost unusable. I did some reading online and tried to follow steps on apple forums. Nothing worked until one post suggested re-installing Snow Leopard from the disk so I decided to give that a try. Once I did that, I tried to follow the steps to install from a Time Machine backup. The computer can find the cloud device and then finds the location of the Time Machine backup. Then I hit "Continue" and it says "no backups can be found".

I then going back to installing 10.5 and had the same issue. I then gave up and went to the apple store and met with a tech at the genius bar. He did the same things that I did above and had the same result. Multiple techs came over and all said the same thing. As a last step, he tried to mount the Time Machine backup to the desktop and it says "permission denied". He tried doing this as a root user as well. He then said that they did all that they can do at the mac store and pointed me to Drive Savers. I called them and they said it will be close to $2,000 for my data to be recovered.

Hard lesson learned about having proper backups. Wedding photos and all of our memories are on that computer :/ Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? I'm desparate. I'm willing to pay Drive Savers that obscene amount of money since it is invaluable to us, but wanted to post here first.

Thanks for any help.

Hard lesson learned about having proper backups. Wedding photos and all of our memories are on that computer :/ Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? I'm desparate. I'm willing to pay Drive Savers that obscene amount of money since it is invaluable to us, but wanted to post here first.

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You may be able to recover your files by using Data Recovery software. No guaranty, but give Data Rescue 4 a try. I believe they have a trial version you can download and test with first.

Hi and welcome.

Sorry for the loss, but first thing to remember, is, even if you pay Drive Savers, they might not be able to recover the lost Data.
By the sounds of it, this Drive was written over multiple times, and with multiple OS's . . . don't use this Mac ANYMORE, to try and minimise the damage done, because every keystroke, will overwrite some space on the drive and will render it more unusable as you go on.

I would be looking at the Seagate Drive first and foremost. See IF a backup was made to it ?? You didn't say if you checked this or not. Try and use another computer to do this though.

As chscag posted above, look at buying Data Recovery 4 or Disk Drill Pro and scan the drive.
I have experimented with Disk Drill Pro, on a External HD and it picked up files I deleted 6 yrs ago. I know this, because it gives a date with the file. So I know it does work.

You need to remember that if this does recover files, you will not know what is what, apart from it being a video file, document file, image file and so on.

Have a read of this post by member lifeisabeach which shows how well Disk Drill Pro will Deep Scan your HD
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/266371-mackeeper-worth-buying-2.html#post1427243
(PLEASE DON'T TAKE ANY NOTICE OF HIM TALKING ABOUT MACKEEPER !! THIS IS BAD STUFF AND YOU SHOULDN'T DOWNLOAD IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES)

It will segregate the different files, but once they are found, it will only name them, file_0001.jpg, file_0002.jpg, file_0003.jpg, file_0004.jpg and so on. Its then up to you to go through the 1000's of images (because it will include every little icon image used by the System too) and find your.
If you have a idea on the size of these images, this will help out in the long run. It will be a long process.