MAC Data Recovery from a PC


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Excuse my Mac ignorance, but I have a friend that has an external 150 gig USB drive that he cannot access. When he gave me the drive he said that he didn't know the type of filesystem, but after using R-Studio it's showing as HFS filesystem. My question is can I copy the data off of the drive onto an NTFS filesystem and then back onto either DVD's or thumbdrive? Will the data be corrupted in anyway? I don't have a Mac so I can't test the data after being copied back to the Mac. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Excuse my Mac ignorance, but I have a friend that has an external 150 gig USB drive that he cannot access. When he gave me the drive he said that he didn't know the type of filesystem, but after using R-Studio it's showing as HFS filesystem. My question is can I copy the data off of the drive onto an NTFS filesystem and then back onto either DVD's or thumbdrive? Will the data be corrupted in anyway? I don't have a Mac so I can't test the data after being copied back to the Mac. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Depends on the type of files but you will almost certainly lose data, the value of that data may be zero or it may be the entire file.

HFS can store data in two 'forks': resource and data. The data fork of a text file may contain just the ASCII text of the document, the resource fork holds the markup to say "line one is bold and blue", etc. NTFS doesn't store this file so copying any files from HFS to NTFS runs the risk of leaving part of the data behind. In addition there are certain file attributes (ie: the execute permission) that will not be copied cleanly across.

Some files are resilient to this sort of thing: you should be able to safely copy zip files or mp3s without issue. Some files are less resilient: applications will likely stop running, bundle documents (like old pages files) may break, etc. You will certainly lose any custom labels, icons, spotlight tags, etc.

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