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Search & Rescue 2.0 ($25 Time-Limited Demo) If the data on your computer is worth anything, you should already be making regular backups, and taking advantage of any autosave feature that your applications support. Despite these precautions, you may one day run into a situation where your Mac crashes or locks up. Whatever the cause, there is a slim chance that, after a Restart, your work has been saved in a folder called Rescued Items inside your Trash. If not, there is hope... When entering data, it must be stored somewhere in your Mac's RAM (Random Access Memory). Unless you turn off your Mac, this data is still available, even after a crash, until some other process or application uses it. Search & Rescue is a utility that can scan the RAM of your Mac for text data. Running it immediately after a crash will maximize the chance of retrieving your data.
Search & Rescue Found Our Data As a test, we created a new SimpleText document, and started entering text. After we were done, we quit the application, but decided not to save. We then ran Search & Rescue, and search for a part of the text that we had just entered. Sure enough, the text was found! The results window applies a "hot" value to the color of the match, from red (high) to black (low). Red values have more text ahead of the search term, making it more likely to be usable text. The thought of using Search & Rescue to find data other than that entered by our own hands briefly entered our mind, but then left. Then again, if there is data being stored in your own RAM, shouldn't you have the right to examine it? We'll leave the moral implications for another day... Search & Rescue can save your you-know-what when disk-based options have been exhausted. Have any other Mac OS Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via email, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum. Useful Link |
