Sometime around 8/12/07 (at 11:46 -0500) KathyDV said:
we had a burst that blew out some stuff and even though it was on a
surge protector, my trusty Maxtor gave its life for the cause.
My house was hit by lightning last July. Fortunately, I use a UPS
(uninterruptible power supply) device, basically a chunky, managed
lead-acid battery that sits between devices and the wall socket. This
gives perhaps 10 minutes grace if there’s a power cut… and it also
provides the kind of surge protection that can make some simpler
surge protectors look like damp paper bags.
Nothing that was protected by the UPS was affected. The things that
were powered on but not protected… well, the insurance agreed to
replace them, thank goodness.
I wrote a UPS technical briefing article for MacUser a while back.
You can find it here:
http://www.thesmallest.com/lessonettes/ups-indepth.html
The odd part was all the pictures it recovered that I had never ever
saved…like stuff I looked at on Yahoo news.
Yahoo is… well, ‘evil’ is a bit harsh, but terribly mercenary and
frequently underhand probably covers it. (Aesthetically shallow too,
although that’s a different kind of complaint.) I don’t like using
it, although popup blocker features in browsers can make a big
difference.
And of course on a less grumpy note, whatever web page you see
(whether you meant to visit it or were fooled into clicking a link)
will write stuff to disk in the browser’s file cache; that’s how
browsers work.
Attachments and other embedded stuff in emails, including spam, are
also quite likely to crop up in file rescue lists too.
Basically, anything that’s ever arrived on your Mac in one way or
another will reside on the disk in data form even if thrown away,
UNTIL that ‘marked as empty’ space on the disk happens to be used
when some other file is written.
If all of a file you threw away is still not overwritten then it can
normally be salvaged. If just part of it is overwritten, some of it
may still be rescuable, depending on the file structure of the
document. If all of it is overwritten, it is gone forever.
k
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