Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Catalog file corruption in Mac OSX causes data loss

Catalog files are files used by file manager to save information about file hierarchy on mac volume, these files are stored in such a way to form B-tree, a B-tree contains index nodes, Leaf nodes and a header node, hence these files are of critical importance.

These files are quiet susceptible to corruption due to many reasons like,
• Virus attack
• Volume header corruption
• Operating System corruption
• Master directory block corruption
• Accidental disk formatting
• Disk initialization
• Partition table corruption

when corruption occurs in these files then all the data in mac drive becomes inaccessible and the following error message is displayed-

“*.* file not found”

If we go deep in the file systems of Mac, the file systems include HFS Wrapper, HFS, HFS+ ( Where HFS is Hierarchical file system). Mac also includes lots of data structures like MBR or master boot record, Boot loader and catalog files, among them catalog files are most important.

As mentioned above Catalogue files are stored in the form of Btree allocation. Block no. of first file extent in catalogue file is stored in MDB  and when Mac hard disk is mount. The information is copied in mac volume and now from header node , node number of root node can be obtained and from there entire files are obtained by file manager. When catalogue corruption occurs, file manager fails to find files stored in the mac volume and data becomes inaccessible.

To fix these problem first of all what we should do is to keep the updated back up of all the files and even if the backup is not available or if it is not updated then the need of third party data recovery software for mac arrives.

In this particular case of node corruption, what you have to do is to search mac data recovery software like stellar phoenix mac, that have functionality to recover data from corrupted catalog files .