mystafied:
Sorry I didn't see this earlier. I'm turning 50 tomorrow, and we had a party yesterday! Was fun!
Anyway, you can buy a program called "Norton Utilities" for either a Mac or a PC, which includes things like "norton disk doctor" for troubleshooting problems on your computer's drives, but it also includes a program for recovering files that have been deleted or damaged by a crash. For the Mac, it's called "norton unerase". You run that utility on the computer's hard drive by booting the computer with the CD that Norton comes on. This will come up with a list of files that it detected and the estimate of how likely it would be to recover them. What you can do, then, is single click on them, and click on "view" at the bottom of the window. This will display the contents of the file without having to open it in the original application. If you quit the Norton application without saving the "recovered" files to another disk, then reboot the computer from it's own drive, there will be no record that you looked.
The reason this works is because, when you delete a file by throwing it in the trash, you delete the "header information" that the application uses to locate and open the file. The files are still on the drive, though, and will remain there until some new file is written over that part of the drive. I've been able to recover files years later this way. Fortunately, that's been for work files that I had to recover to save lost time.
Norton is a great program, but there are others. Also, for PCs, there are "spyware" programs that will record keystrokes, and even email them to an account that you designate, all without the user's knowledge. This would be needed if you had to check up on emails currently being sent. I'm not aware of any such applications that work on Macs, though. But if you have PCs, there's a lot you can do if you need to. But don't forget, it can make you nuts. In my case, reading old emails between my W and RM before D-day (or even after D-day) only exposed me to the hurtful things they said and did. I don't think I've found anything that my W hasn't told me (reluctantly at times, perhaps). So at least she's being truthful about the generalities and timing.
Best regards,
-Qfwfq
