Parallels and deleted files

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Hi,

Today I downloaded Parallels, and when I booted up the virtual machine I saw that all of the folders on my desktop on my Mac were on the windows one as well. Not knowing that the default setting is that the files are shared between my Mac and windows virtual machine, I assumed the folders on Parallels were duplicates, deleted the folders to save space and emptied the recycling bin. A couple minutes later I looked at my Mac desktop to find, to my horror, that I had permanently deleted the desktop folders there as well. That was about 3 hours ago. The folders contain files that have both sentimental and practical value. Mostly what I need to recover are .docx files and .png and .jpg pictures.

Since then I've downloaded a couple different data recovery software apps and tried to recover the data, but without much luck. Not sure how the Parallels issue will affect things, so in the virtual machine configurations I set Mac and windows to share all files. The only option both Stellar Data Recovery and Desk Drill give me is to scan the entire hard disk. The results they spit out seem to be a lot of unreadable files, none of which are .png or .docx; many of them are suspiciously only 10MB each. My computer is a 2014 Macbook Pro running Mojave 10.14.4. I would really appreciate any kind of help with this.
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

Unfortunately, most data recovery software doesn't work as one would suspect. They can find recently deleted files, as long as the computer is not used immediately after the deletion. In addition, they don't recover files with the folder structure intact, no the original files names most of the time.

Did you happen to have any form of Time Machine or other backup of your data?

If the software you purchased isn't finding anything, the only recourse is to stop using the computer and look into professional data recovery. It can be quite expensive, and still doesn't guarantee recovery of your files.

Sorry I don't have better news or a better solution.

C
 
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Hi,

Today I downloaded Parallels, and when I booted up the virtual machine I saw that all of the folders on my desktop on my Mac were on the windows one as well. Not knowing that the default setting is that the files are shared between my Mac and windows virtual machine, I assumed the folders on Parallels were duplicates, deleted the folders to save space and emptied the recycling bin. A couple minutes later I looked at my Mac desktop to find, to my horror, that I had permanently deleted the desktop folders there as well. That was about 3 hours ago. The folders contain files that have both sentimental and practical value. Mostly what I need to recover are .docx files and .png and .jpg pictures.

Since then I've downloaded a couple different data recovery software apps and tried to recover the data, but without much luck. Not sure how the Parallels issue will affect things, so in the virtual machine configurations I set Mac and windows to share all files. The only option both Stellar Data Recovery and Desk Drill give me is to scan the entire hard disk. The results they spit out seem to be a lot of unreadable files, none of which are .png or .docx; many of them are suspiciously only 10MB each. My computer is a 2014 Macbook Pro running Mojave 10.14.4. I would really appreciate any kind of help with this.

Do you have an SSD in your Mac? Since SSDs in Mac are TRIM enabled which secure erases the data within deletion. Perhaps the reasons why data recovery software couldn't work out as expected.
 

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