OfficeSalvage v6.1.5 (Universal Binary)

Undelete your office documents from your Apple Macintosh computer. Recover files and rescue data from corrupted or damaged OS X hard drives. Retrieve data from formatted or initialized devices.

If you've lost data and you need to get it back, OfficeSalvage is your best choice. It's the ultimate Mac OS X tool for data recovery. OfficeSalvage recovers deleted files, damaged or missing volumes, and even formatted disks. An exhaustive scan of the drive is performed to locate lost files and partitions. Your are presented with a view of recoverable files so that you may copy them to another safe location such as an external drive. your iDisk, or a networked drive.

Built for your OS X 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, or 10.3.9 Panther Mac.

OfficeSalvage recovers data from hard drives, CD-ROM, external devices, digital camera cards, Apple iPods, and much more! OfficeSalvage is compatible with Apple Mac OS X.

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1: Introduction - About OfficeSalvage

What is OfficeSalvage?

OfficeSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted word processing and other office document files from a drive or volume.  OfficeSalvage is designed to restore files that have:

• been accidentally deleted.
• become unreadable due to media faults.
• stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.

Even with its advanced features and performance, OfficeSalvage is extremely straightforward to handle. The easy-to-use interface is designed with any level of OS X user in mind and is highly accessible to all, with the potential completion of the whole recovery process within just a few clicks.

OfficeSalvage Features

Written specifically for Mac OS X, OfficeSalvage includes powerful features that give the user greater control and flexibility in analyzing and retrieving lost data:

Safety first - OfficeSalvage will never write to the disk or device being salvaged from. This makes the software “risk-free”, as it does not attempt to repair a disk or alter its contents. Instead OfficeSalvage simply reads it and copies the relevant files to a destination of the user’s choice.

Searches free space - On HFS+ volumes, the user can limit OfficeSalvage to scan only the free space of a volume to recover files from.  This produces huge speed efficiency and means that the task of recovering files can be accomplished much quicker.  By default, ‘Undelete’ scans for “free space” whilst ‘Salvage’ will scan the entire space on a device.

Recovers files after a disk or device has been formatted - Have an initialized disk or other device with files that you want back? No problem! So long as the drive was not securely initialized, OfficeSalvage should be able to recover the files from the drive.

Recovers files from corrupt media – Data corruption does not stop OfficeSalvage from working. In fact it will happily process an entire corrupted file system for intact data and recover whole or partial files wherever it finds them.

OfficeSalvage works on faulty hardware - OfficeSalvage can also recover data from mechanically unsound devices. The software uses several tried and tested methods, which in addition SubRosaSoft has improved upon, to read the same piece of information and to automatically skip of areas of the file system that are fully unreadable. By employing these methods, OfficeSalvage is able to recover data from sources that may have appeared to other software to be too physically broken to use.

Preview - Allows the user to preview a range of available files before choosing to recover them.   Using the underlying architecture of Mac OS X, OfficeSalvage can read and display word and other office document files.

Contacting SubRosaSoft, Inc.

Comments & Questions

If you have comments, problems, or questions about this product, or if you are interested in a site license, please contact us via email: info@subrosasoft.com. For information regarding technical help, please refer to “Finding Help…” at the end of Chapter 3.

2: Using OfficeSalvage - Understanding the Core Functions  

System Requirements

OfficeSalvage is programmed to run on the following minimum specification:

• Apple Power Macintosh CPU (Intel or PPC), that is capable of running
• Mac OS X (version 10.3 or above), with at least
• 256MB of RAM
• Hard Disk
• CD/DVD-ROM Drive (for CD Installation)

The Recovery Process

The recovery process is a simple 2-step procedure:

1. Gather a list of available files
2. Recover the files to an alternate location

Step one of the process is easy enough to understand. With OfficeSalvage simply gathering a list of available data.  However, it is important to understand on the secondary step that when a user is recovering data from a device or volume, he or she should NOT save the recovered data back to the same location. 

Why? The answer is simple enough, but does not necessarily occur to most people. When recovering data and saving to the same location, the device will not stop to think whether it is overwriting “free space” or not. That is to say that it will happily overwrite data to blocks of the hard drive that it knows are not allocated with files.  Therefore, when the user is recovering files he or she could easily overwrite the very blocks of data that contain data marked for recovery.

What’s the solution to this? Well the solution is either to use another partition on the same device or to have a secondary device such as an external FireWire hard drive to write the recovered files to. When recovering files the user must also be sure to have an equal amount of free space to recover to, running out of space will cause an error message and halt the recovery process, thus forcing the user to have to start the process all over again.

The Main Window – An Overview

Immediately after start-up, the user will be presented with the OfficeSalvage splash screen. Once this has disappeared, he or she will then be taken to the ‘Main Window’. The Main Window is the starting point for performing any task and provides the user with access to the 3 core areas of functionality: ‘Undelete’; ‘Salvage’; and ‘Explore browse’ mode. Each of which is discussed at greater length in this chapter.

The Layout

The layout of the window is effectively divided into 3 sections:

The first part is the ‘Welcome Message’ and logo. The second is the ‘Task/Explore' which provides access to and information about the Explore window, as well as a device drop list, from the user user should select the device/volume from which OfficeSalvage will attempt to recover files, whilst the third is the Show Help … button and progress bar.  The Show Help … button provides the user with access to the relevant help pages online at http://www.subrosasoft.com/. The progress bar is invoked when performing such tasks as rescanning the bus and attaching images.

Rescanning for a Device

If a device has been attached to the host computer after OfficeSalvage has been started and the Main Window reached, it may or may not appear automatically in the available drop down menus alongside each task in the Main Window. If this is the case, then simply select “Rescan” from the File drop menu and OfficeSalvage will be forced to search for all available Devices and Volumes, including Devices that cannot be mounted. Alternatively one can use the keyboard shortcut: [apple key] + [r]. 

Bus rescanning can be performed at any moment whilst using OfficeSalvage.  Whether a user is looking at the Main Window, Undelete window, Salvage window or Explore window, this option is always available in the File drop menu

Attaching a Disk Image

When working with a disk image, it is possible to request OfficeSalvage to mount the image from within the application. This provides the user with a wider array of compatibility with disk image types rather than relying on the underlying ability of Mac OS X. 

To attach an image, simply select “Attach Disk Image” from the File drop menu and an “Open” dialog box will come to the fore. Having found the image, select it and click Open, OfficeSalvage will then read and mount the Volume in the computer’s Finder/Desktop. Alternatively the user can attach an image with the keyboard shortcut: [apple key] + [t], which brings up the “Open” dialog box.

Using Explore Mode

‘Explore Mode’ provides users with greater flexibility to find and recover the exact files they desire.  It is designed for those users who have more time and perhaps desire to be selective about the items that they wish to recover, rather than simply undeleting or salvaging huge numbers of files of a single or multiple types.

Starting Explore Mode View

To start the ‘Explore Mode’ , the user must select the desired device or volume for investigation in the drop list of the Main Window and then press Explore.  This will bring the ‘Explore’ window to the fore.

The Layout

The window layout can be divided into 5 core sections:

• Header Info
• File type presets
• Scan results window pane
• Preview windows
• Buttons bar

The header info again provides the user with basic information regarding the device/volume that he or she selected for ‘Explore Mode’. Information includes, but is not limited to: name; size, device name; and mount point.

The file type presets, predefines the types of files that OfficeSalvage will recover. The file type presets are split into the following groups, each with a specific icon button:

• All known file types
• Audio file types – e.g. MP3, WAV, AIFF 
• Picture file types – e.g. JPG, TIFF, GIF
• Office file types – e.g. DOC, XLS, PPT
• Video file types – e.g. MOV, MPG, ASF

However, OfficeSalvage is only designed for the use of recovering word processing and other office document files and so in explore mode, only the Office Document filetype button is selected and working. For the ability recover other file types the user must obtain the relevant salvage software from http://www.subrosasoft.com

An advantage of using the ‘Explore Mode’ that in window pane above the icon buttons for each set of file types, the user is able to see the entire list of the file types/extensions that OfficeSalvage will hunt for in the scanning process prior to actual recovery.  This is a filter list, and its contents of course depend upon the selection of the file type icon buttons below the pane.

Once the user has performed a scan, the results will appear in file type grouped lists within the Scan Results window pane.  To navigate the result sets, the user must drop down the results for each group using the “disclosure triangle”.  This provides the full information for each file, which includes: file name and size, as well as the block offset number.

In reviewing the results provided by the scanning procedure, the user is able to select individual result items in the results pane for preview in the Preview windows.  By selecting an item in the results pane, OfficeSalvage will load a picture of the icon and file data in the upper window, and attempt to read the file and display the contents in the lower of the two windows.  Where necessary, OfficeSalvage will also display multimedia controls.

Scanning for Files to Recover

Having selected the requisite file types for scanning, the user is now ready to proceed with the file-gathering step of the salvage process.  To get the scan started, the user should simply click the Scan button in the bottom right hand corner of the window.  This will bring a progress box to the fore at the top of the window and provide the user with live update statistics regarding the progress of the scanning procedure and the number of file found.

To help speed up the scan procedure, the user should make sure that the ‘FREE space only” option is checked. This will force OfficeSalvage to only scan portions of the drive that have not been allocated within the file catalog.

When completed the user will be presented with a dialog box confirming the completion of the scanning process with the final statistics.  He or she should close this by clicking on OK, at which point the user can then begin to review the results of the scan in the respective pane of the window.

Exporting & Importing Results

Once a partial or entire scan has been completed, the user can save the results of the scan to an export DAT file.  This can then be re-imported to OfficeSalvage at a later date, thus allowing the user to complete the task of salvaging files in a series of steps over a longer period of time, stopping and starting as he or she goes

To save the export DAT file, the user should, having finished scanning, select “Save” from the File drop menu. This will bring a Save dialog box to the fore. The user should then just select a location into which to save the file, giving it a name at the same time, and then simply click Save.

Having generated and exported a set of scan results the user can re-import them at a later point in time, and start the procedure of recovering files again.  To import the scan results, select “Open” from the File menu.  Within the dialog box that appears, locate the DAT file and then click Open.

Previewing Scan Results

Having generated a set of results. The user can preview a range of different file types simply by selecting the respective file in the results pane and then viewing the data in the two available preview windows as described above in the layout.

Recovering Files

Having scanned, reviewed, and previewed the available data, the user can finally select and salvage the desired files, one by one.  To do so, he or she must select each individual line item in the results pane. Once selected, the user has just to click the Salvage button at the bottom right of the results pane.  This will return a “Save” dialog box from which the user should select an external location to which to save the data and then click Save.

Renaming Files

In recovering files, the user has the option to force OfficeSalvage to attempt to rename the files it recovers, doing so based on existing file headers. This means that it uses the headers to restore existing filenames rather than simply using standard filenames with auto-incremented numbers, thus making it much easier to identify and reorganized the salvaged files.  To do this, make sure the “Auto-Rename” option is checked below the scan results pane, prior to performing a salvage procedure.

Selecting Multiple Files

Rather than scan and recover files on an individual basis, it is possible for the user to select multiple files, either using the [Apple Key] + [A] to “Select ALL” items or using [Option] + [Mouse Click Item] to select items randomly and selectively.

3: Getting Started - The Basics of OfficeSalvage

Registration Number

Each user is required to have a registration number, otherwise known as a serial number, in order to complete the full version installation of the software properly.  Whether the software has been purchased online or through a third party retail channel, the user needs the registration number to hand when preparing for installation of the software.

Online Purchase

When purchasing the software online at: http://www.subrosasoft.com/ the registration number is automatically emailed as part of the purchase confirmation.  If a confirmation email is not received, please ensure that it has not mistakenly been placed in the email client’s junk folder before requesting technical support.  Having received the email, please make a print out and store this in a safe and secure place for future reference.

Retail Purchase

If the software was purchased through a retail channel, the registration number should be inside the case right next to the CD (or attached to the upper right hand corner of the jewel case).  Please be sure to keep these details in a safe and secure place.

No Registration Number - Demo Mode

Without a registration number it is only possible to start using a version of OfficeSalvage with limited functionality. In Demo Mode the user will be able to scan for files but will be unable to recover them. For full recovery functionality, the user must register his or her version of OfficeSalvage. To do this, purchase a the software online or via a retail channel, and then simply select “Register” from the OfficeSalvage drop menu and enter a valid registration number in the dialog screen.

Updates and Upgrades

A single registration number is valid for incremental updates to the purchased version of OfficeSalvage.  When upgrading between versions the purchase of a new registration number will be required. For information on upgrades, please email sales@subrosasoft.com.

Lost Registration Numbers

Please ensure that you keep your registration number in a safe and secure place. Print off confirmation emails, or back them up. Store CD/CD jewel cases in a secure place. SubRosaSoft Inc. cannot guarantee the ability to re-issue serial numbers for our users.

Site Licenses

Site Licences can be purchased online via http://www.subrosasoft.com/. For volume discounts please contact us directly via email: sales@subrosasoft.com.

Obtaining the Latest Version

Downloading from the Web Site

It is a must for any user to ensure that they have the latest version of the OfficeSalvage software. The latest version is always freely available for download on our web site at: http://www.subrosasoft.com/

A download link, alongside version information, is accessible on the product page of the site.  Simply click the respective link and a compressed archive file will automatically begin to download to the desktop, or another specified download location.

OfficeSalvage versions are distributed in a ZIP archive format and can be decompressed in the Mac OS Finder with a simple double-click of file icon.  This will place the decompressed application file in the same location as the original ZIP archive, most likely the desktop.  If the file will not decompress automatically, it may be necessary to install Smith Micro’s Stuffit Expander (www.stuffit.com) or similar decompression software.

Having decompressed the application, we strongly recommend that this copy of OfficeSalvage then be moved to Applications folder and the original ZIP archive file be placed in the Trash for deletion.

Using WebCheck

OfficeSalvage has an in-built web-enabled version checker.  This is invoked at application start-up and will make a single web request for a text file, stored on SubRosaSoft’s servers, that contains the most up-to-date version number of the software.  This is solely for the purpose of comparison with the version on OfficeSalvage’s host computer.  At no point does SubRosaSoft collect any identifying information and the request to our servers is no different from making a similar request in your web browser, and browsing our web site. 

When OfficeSalvage determines the version of the software to be out-of-date, the user will be prompted to download a newer version of the software by a dialog box that will come to the fore. Of course, should the user not wish to update at that point in time he or she can cancel the prompt, and review the update again next time OfficeSalvage is started.

If the user prefers to disable this functionality, and ignore update requests, he or she should simply select “Disable WebCheck” from the File drop menu.

Installing & Updating OfficeSalvage

Prior to starting installation or updates and upgrades to OfficeSalvage, the user should ensure that he or she has logged into OSX with administrative capabilities.  When preparing to install the necessary files, OfficeSalvage will prompt the user for the admin password. If a valid password is not entered, the installation will be unable to proceed and OfficeSalvage will quit when Cancel is clicked.

Installing or Updating via Download

Once the software has been downloaded from the site and decompressed, the user should simply drag & drop OfficeSalvage into the Applications folder, or to the previously selected desired location.  If prompted to replace the existing version of the file, click Replace. When updating to the latest version, the user may be prompted with an install dialog window after application start-up. If so, click the Install button and proceed as usual.

Initial Setup

The first time the application is launched the user will be asked accept the End User License Agreement and then to enter his or her email address (optional) along with a valid registration number. 

Having done this the user will be asked once more if they wish to accept the installation of files to the host computer. Simply click Yes to accept and finalize the process, at which point the admin user password will be requested. Once correctly entered, a progress bar will run marking the progress of the installation of files. When the necessary files have been added to the system, the user will then be taken to the ‘Main Window’.

Uninstalling OfficeSalvage

Removing OfficeSalvage from a system is an easy 2-step process. Once OfficeSalvage is up and running, select ‘Uninstall’ from the “OfficeSalvage” drop menu.  This will initiate an uninstall procedure and the necessary files will be deleted from the file system.  Having done this OfficeSalvage will quit and all that is left to be done is for the user to locate the OfficeSalvage application in the Applications folder, or other desired location, and drag & drop it into the Trash, ready for eventual deletion.

Finding Help & Technical Support

Should the user need assistance whilst working with OfficeSalvage, there are a number of sources through which to get help:

Help within OfficeSalvage

The user can find help in 3 different possible places. The first is from the Help drop menu, which offers the options of “Showing Help” or taking the user other relevant web pages on the SubRosaSoft web site. Secondly, the user may click the Show Help … button from the Main or other Task Windows.

Finally, the user may also use the arrow cursor to hover over elements within each window of OfficeSalvage. This will invoke Help Tips and provide the user with a brief description or other information regarding what that element of the window represents.

Technical Support

Our technical support is free via email and can be accessed at the following address: support@subrosasoft.com.  The support hours are 9am to 5pm Pacific Standard Time Monday to Friday (GMT -8). 

In addition to any support question(s), the user must include ALL of the following pieces of information:

• Valid registration number.
• System configuration(s) – hard drive make, model etc.
• System OS version.

System related information can be found by using the “System Profiler” application in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

4: Appendices

A - Menu Shortcuts Reference

The following shortcuts are specific to the OfficeSalvage Application.

Apple Key is also called key.

B - Recovery File Types List

The following is a list of file formats that can be recovered using SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage version 5:

• AppleWorks Document,cwk
  
• FileMaker 5 Database,none
  
• FileMaker 7 Database,fp7
  
• HTML,html
  
• Mail (Mail.app email),emlx
  
• Mail (mbox standard mailbox file),txt
  
• Mathematica,nb
  
• Microsoft Excel Documents,xls
  
• Microsoft PowerPoint Documents,ppt
  
• Microsoft Word Documents,doc
  
• PDF,pdf
  
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics),png
  
• Quark Express,none
  
• QuickBooks,none
  
• RTF (Rich Text Format) text,rtf
  
• Stuffit SIT,sit
  
• Stuffit SITX,sitx
  
• TurboTax,none