Mac and Apple Data Recovery:
Whether using
a PC or a Mac, for business or pleasure, valuable data should be
protected from impending harm caused by a virus, hackers, power
surges, human error, natural disasters and more. The most important
step in keeping data safe from being deleted, stolen, lost or damaged
is to back-up regularly. By doing so, if something should happen
to threaten the integrity of the electronic information, users will
still have a recent copy of all important files, emails, databases,
spreadsheets and more.
File Systems:
A file system is a structure that organizes large numbers of files
on some sort of recording medium (most commonly a disk drive). The
idea is to store the files on the disk so that they can be accessed
randomly and with minimal time delay. The PC and Mac differ in the
way they store files. These differences can make it difficult when
copying files between platforms. Not all Mac files will be useful
on a PC and vice versa. Executable program files compiled for one
platform cannot be used on the other, but there are many that have
a separate version for each platform.
Mac Files:
On a Mac each file can have two parts called forks - a data fork
and a resource fork. These are actually two files linked to one
name in the Mac file system. The resource fork holds resources (icons,
fonts, menus, sounds, etc.). Since each resource fork can hold many
resources, it has a specific structure that allows programs to find
and access a particular resource quickly. The data fork can hold
any type of data (text, images, etc.) and does not have a required
a structure like the resource fork. Mac resource forks are generally
of no use on the PC, but it is possible for a PC program to convert
specific resources to a PC format. Our program CrossFont can do
this with Mac fonts which exist in the resource fork. The contents
of the Mac data fork is usually all that can be used on a PC. Once
a Mac file is copied to the PC, the resource fork, type and creator
information are lost unless the file is encoded with MacBinary or
a similar format (HQX, SIT, etc.) that saves the Mac specific data
with the file. This way the file can exist on a single fork machine
(PC, UNIX) or be telecommunicated and decoded at the other end with
all Mac information intact.
It is useful to have a way to identify the type of
a file as well as which application created it. The Mac file system
has this information stored with the file name and other information.
They are two four character fields called the type and creator.
Mac programs can use many different types of files. The type field
tells the program what type of data is in each file so it can parse
it properly. It also allows a program to filter files in an open
file dialog box so the user can only open files of a certain type.
The creator field is unique for each Mac application. When an application
creates a file, it puts a creator signature in this field which
identifies that this application should be launched when a user
double clicks on the icon of the file.
DTI has the capabilities to repair hard drives, but unlike many competitors,
they also have the software experience to work on the different
types of MAC file systems.
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