Well i was tidying up some files in a very important directory on our development server and somehow some plank had put a recursive sybmolic link in it. Which I the even bigger plank tried to delete from my FTP client. My FTP client then thought it would be OK to delete not only the sybmolic link but also the entire directory that it was pointing to (which happened to be the very important directory). <- This smiley isnt angry enough for how I feel. The situation became a lot worse when i realised the external backup disk was not plugged in and now doesn't work. I looked at my backup logs and realised the last time the directory was backed up was on September 2008. My biggest concern is the admin control panel which controls all administration of our sites. Which i have made many additions too since Sept 2008. I can't even mount the external drive it beeps horribly at me. Luckily my backup script tars the folders its backing up before copyint them to the backup disk so I can get to the Sept 2008 copy of that folder. However I'm reluctant to restore the folder to that date just yet. Because before I make any new files on this directory I need to look into data recovery for MAC OS X 10.3.9. I need to know if there is any FREE way to recover deleted files on this drive? The drive isn't the primary partition luckily so i doubt hardly any files have been written to it and will be. I downloaded the only Free thing i could find called testdisk-6.11.2 which comes with photrec which looked ideal. Whilst it works on my laptop Mac OS X 10.4.11 it doesn't work on my server complains like so

My company won't really allow me any down time as it's out mail server. They'll lose money and since in the current economic climate they were too hard up to even buy me a new backup disk when i asked I can't see it happening. So I can't even really take the disks out and connect them to the laptop to do the recovery with this software. Does anyone know if I can get this working somehow on the server? Or if there are any other similar utilities that will work with MAC OS X 10.3.9? Another thing I wondered is if there is a way to copy all the unused sectors of partition B to Partition A? I looked on google and not many people are interested in backing up unused sectors (would seem pointless to most). Well i really need any advise I can get at this time. And could someone tell me why I can't delete recursive symbolic links the way I did and how should I delete them should I find any more? I'm really considering going and buying my very own huge external USB disk this weekend and ghosting the disks. Then running the other utility from the laptop on those disks (I kind of need a personal external disk for my home PC anyway). So my final question is is there a disk cloning utility out there that will copy the whole disk unused sectors included?

I'm angry at myself, unix, my ftp client, my empty .Trash, My boss, The External Disk and the person who put the file there