Retrieve Maliciously Deleted Messages

D

DeWayne A. Nelon

Long story short, someone got access to my laptop and deleted several
messages that I had previously saved (including deleting them from the
³Deleted Items² folder). As these messages were from a POP account and
several weeks/months old; simply re-downloading them is not an option
either. My efforts to search the free space on the disk for keywords has
not been successful either (I only have Norton for this). Any other ideas?

Entourage 2004 V 11.1.0
1GHz PB
 
A

Allen Watson

No luck. if they are deleted from Deleted Items, they are gone. You should
have a backup of your Entourage identity, and update it every day or two.
Then you have some hope of recovering things from your backup.

I use a shell script, scheduled with cron (using the free tool Cronnix), to
create a zipped archive of my entire Microsoft User Data folder every day. I
keep only the three most recent copies. I named the script "CpErageDB.sh"
and I store it in ~/Library/Scripts/Utility/Crontab, along with the
AppleScript it runs to purge the backups back to three copies.

The shell script contents:

#!/bin/sh
ditto -c -k -X --rsrc ~/Documents/"Microsoft User Data" "/Users/Microsoft
User Data`date +%m-%d-%y`.zip"
osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Utility/CronTab/purge\ MUD\ backups

The content of the "purge MUD backups" AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
set dir to "Users:"
set fList to files in folder dir whose name begins with "Microsoft User"
if (count fList) > 3 then
repeat with a from 1 to ((count fList) - 3)
delete {item a of fList}
end repeat
end if
empty trash
end tell

You may want to remove the "empty trash" line if you don't want your trash
automatically emptied once a day.

In Cronnix, I set up a job to run every weekday at 5:30 AM. The command is
simply the path to the shell script:

/Users/allen/Library/Scripts/Utility/CronTab/CpErageDB.sh

You will be astonished at how fast ditto can make a zipped archive!
 
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