Help restoring recovered files

• Feb 5, 2017 - 19:06

My computer died... and the folks I took into for repair accidentally wiped my drive. I took the hard drive to a file recovery center and several hundred of my MuseScore files seem to have been sucessfully recovered. However, when I try to open them, I get an error message. "Cannot Read File."

Files were created and are being opened in MuseScore 2.0.3. Old and new systems are Mac OSX.

I'm attaching a sample file--an arrangement of Joplin's "Euphonic Sounds" for clarinet choir. Currently I cannot open this file.

Has anyone had experience with this? Where do I start?

Attachment Size
Euphonic_Sounds-Clarinet Choir.mscz, 40.41 KB

Comments

Also renaming the file (remove the final comma) I can not open it. It does not seem, however, a file generated with MuseScore

In reply to by Shoichi

What actually makes you think so?
A MuseScorre .mscz file is basically a zip-archive in disguise. That file is anything but a valid zip archive (first 4 bytes should be 'PK^C^D').
I'm affraid this file is corrupted beyond repair.

In reply to by Shoichi

interpreting compressed files as text is doomed to fail (you'll just see a lot of binary junk), but you still see the 'magic' "PKsomething" at the beginning of the clean file and parts of the table of content "META-INF/Container.xml" and "Thumbnails/thumbnail.png" too. None of this is seen in the broken file...
If WinZIP, 7zip or the like can't open it, MuseScore can't either.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thanks for this... My guess is that when the files were pulled from the drive, the files were assembled improperly. The weird thing is that I recovered a *ton* of files from the drive... jpgs, media, word files... all coming back just fine. But only the MuseScore files are corrupted. Maybe whatever software they used to recover the files wasn't configured properly? Perhaps a properly configured scan will bring up the files whole and complete.

In reply to by reedfriendly

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon that data recovery would sometimes have trouble matching blocks of data with files - the mapping between them is one of the things that often gets lost in a disk crash. No particular I can think other than bad luck it happens to have occurred more often with your MuseScore files than other files. I guess it's possible that something about the ZIP format (which is the "Z" in MSCZ) scatters things differently from other formats, but I suspect it's really just coincidence it seems to be hitting your MuseScore files only. Like, maybe these are actually the most recently modified, and that's the real common thread.

So that file has not been successfully recovered, it is completly broken. Onlything that has been recovered is the file name and maybe some other meta data (size, ownerships, permissions), but not anything useful of the file's Content.
Besides is is a backup file (i.e. ends with a comma (,) and probably starts with a dot (.) on your machine) in the first place, so an old version of a file. Might have been better than nothing, but not in this case unfortunatly

I'm very sorry to say that – given that you say the system is OS/X – "apparently, you never discovered Time Machine."

By using an external (USB or FireWire or what-have-you) disk drive, your Mac could have been taking up-to-the-hour backups all this time ... of everything.   This capability has been a part of OS/X for many years now.

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