osx - Recover the OS X Mavericks installer which got deleted automatically after upgrade

15
2013-12
  • Himanshu Pokhariya

    I have two MacBooks running Mountain Lion.

    I just upgraded one of them to Mavericks. I was hoping to reuse the /Applications/Install OS X Mavericks.app that I downloaded for the first Mac on the other one (I have a slow connection with limited data.)

    But the file seems to have been deleted automatically once the upgrade was over. It's not even in the Trash.

    Is there any easy way to recover this file?

    • Answers
  • slhck

    Unless you backed up that file somewhere after downloading it from the App Store, no, there is no way to recover the file.

    OS X deletes the complete installer after a successful installation.

  • MarcusJ

    Apple deletes the installer after being installed, just download it again, you can either search the app store for it, or go to the purchases tab and it should be pretty close to the top result.


    • Related Question

    osx - Can items deleted from "Trash" be recovered?
  • Miraaj

    On a Mac we have option to delete items securely from trash, while deleting it warns that: "once deleted items will not be recovered".

    I want to know that is there any way by which items deleted "normally, (not securely)" from "Trash" can be recovered?

    Thanks


    • Related Answers
  • Jonathan Leffler

    Substantially, no.

    The disk blocks might still contain most of the original data, but there isn't a way to access them short of going direct to the raw disk device. Further, there is no reliable way to decide which blocks were part of the original file. They are on the free list and will be reused when convenient to the file system.

  • KeithB

    To expand on this a bit, when you normally delete a file from the trash, the system just removes the information about where the data in the file is located on the disk, and adds those locations to the free list, which is used to figure out where to put data for new files. The data that was in the deleted file is still on the disk until it gets overwritten. It is possible for someone to search through the disk as a raw device, which is basically just a series of bytes that make up all of the files and all of the free space, looking for interesting data. For a file of any significant length, the data from the file will be in several different spots on the disk, so it would be hard to automatically recreate the file.

    What secure delete does it write over the data in the file, with zeros or random data, before deleting it. That way, none of the information in the file remains on the disk. This takes a lot longer, as every byte of the file has to be overwritten, instead of just removing some housekeeping information.

  • junh1024

    Filesalvage or Data Rescue might do the trick for common file types. It also helps if you regularly defragment your HD as files are in a complete unbroken stream.