Quick way to restore preferences and profile info?

hi,
i was messing around with the profile info when i probably shouldn't have, and threw stuff in the trash i probably shouldn't have. i did this because i was confused as to why i had to profiles in my users folder. so wanted to get rid of it, i don't know why.
can you help me fix what i screwed up?
all my preferences are back to defaults. mail.app is missing my accounts and thinks its the first time I've used it, same thing with itunes, and ableton live, also firefox too, address book and ical.
also, my deleting that extra profile because it "didn't look good", has just gone and made another profile. which has a lot of .plist files in it?
thanks,

[email protected] wrote:
everything was backed up onto an external hard drive and online; mp3's, documents, plugins, pictures, videos.
Good!
just not the profile. is there anyway i can get that back without having to reenter data for mail.app and itunes?
If you put it in the trash and then emptied the trash, your best hope of recovery is to quit using the drive and see if Data Rescue or File Salvage (I think that's the name) can recover the data. Data Rescue has a demo mode so you can see what it could recover and decide if it is worth the cost to you. I don't know about File Salvage but I've seen it mentioned occasionally as an alternative. If you used a secure erase option or have such an option enabled, don't bother as the chances these utilities can help are negligible. Beyond these options, you are talking about sophisticated data recovery services with equally sophisticated price lists.
I'm sorry not to be able to offer something more positive but unfortunately there is no unempty-trash-and-undelete-contents option. Give Data Rescue a shot (I think it is Data Rescue II now). I haven't used it but I've heard very good things about it. You need a separate drive to recover the data to and you will get the best results if you use the machine (or, rather, the internal drive) as little as possible. Unfortunately, restarting will not have helped but at least Data Rescue's demo lets you see what's still there so you can decide if it is worth the price.
There may be other data recovery utilities around which you could look at but - short of a specialised service - some such utility is your best hope at this point.
Alternatively, you may wish to chalk this up to experience and move on.
If you don't trust your install of OS X, I'd recommend taking this opportunity to reinstall yourself. Depending on how your system is configured and your preferences, either archive & install or erase & install. If you choose a & i, though, don't choose to preserve users since your only user account is essentially dead anyway. Doing this may be more work, but it is much better to have a system you trust. I'm not entirely clear what has gone wrong with your installations (other than deleting your home directory, of course), but starting over will give you a fresh start and a known-good system.
- cfr

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