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DataLoss posts

Filed under: Ask TUAW, iPhone

Dear Aunt TUAW: Recovering iPhone data and media

by Erica Sadun (RSS feed) on Oct 26th, 2009

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I'm from the Philippines and I would just like to ask for your help. I don't know if the news had reached you guys but there had been some massive flood lately in our country brought about by super typhoons storming over our land. Anyway, I own an iPhone and thank God I brought it with me when the flash flood came which sadly destroyed my PC and laptop. Now I have a new desktop which leads me to my problem. I'm afraid to install iTunes in it because if ever I'd sync my phone with the new desktop, I'm pretty sure all my iPod files will be gone. Are there any work around for it (so that I can still save my files on my phone)? Will jailbreaking help (as a last resort)?

Thanks and more power! =)

Best regards,

Rand B.

Read on for Auntie's answer...

Continue reading “Dear Aunt TUAW: Recovering iPhone data and media”

Tags: Aunt TUAW, Auntie TUAW, AuntieTuaw, AuntTuaw, Data Loss, DataLoss, Dear Aunt TUAW, DearAuntTuaw, iphone, Typhoons

Filed under: Odds and ends

Backups save the day after data loss

by TJ Luoma (RSS feed) on Oct 13th, 2009

About 13GB of data was accidentally deleted from my account on my Mac yesterday. Fortunately, due to an aggressive backup system, I was able to recover all of the files.

I was trying to test out a tip sent to the TUAW team, which led me to log into (and out of) the "Guest" account several times. One of the logins seemed to hang, which triggered a memory about a data loss bug in Snow Leopard which I had read about (and which Apple is now acknowledging in "extremely rare" cases, per Cnet). I immediately reached around the back of my iMac and shut it down.

At first I thought everything was OK, but then Dropbox started asking me to configure settings, as if it was the first time the app was run. Fortunately, due to the new "LAN sync" feature in recent Dropbox betas, the iMac copied my Dropbox files from my MacBook Pro on the same network in a matter of seconds, rather than having to download almost 2GB of data from Dropbox's servers.

I thought that was the end of the problems, until I saw that my Terminal customizations were missing. Then I noticed that a few other applications were not functioning correctly. Suddenly I realized that I had most likely suffered more data loss than was immediately obvious.

Read on to see what had to be done to recover after the data loss occurred.

Continue reading “Backups save the day after data loss”

Tags: backup, BackupStrategies, bbedit, CarbonCopyCloner, chronosync, DataLoss, dropbox, mobileme

Filed under: Bugs/Recalls

TextEdit data loss concerns

by Erica Sadun (RSS feed) on Dec 20th, 2006

Over at MacOSXHints, Rob G. has posted a must-read article about possible data loss from TextEdit's Save dialog. The problem stems from TextEdit's (and Cocoa's) willingness to overwrite entire folders with text files.

This data security hole seems to occur because "bundle" style files (which are actually folders and not single files) are considered on-par with flat files in OS X. TextEdit does not seem to check to ensure that the folder being replaced is actually a bundle and not, say, your entire home directory. It's an important article to read and a bug that you need to be aware of.

Tags: Data loss, DataLoss, MacOSXHints, TextEdit

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