I hate buying this type of software because it usually means Something Bad Has Just Happened and I'm Desperate to Throw Money at the Problem (Disk Warrior, etc.) but in this case, it was well spent.
How my data loss happened: I was formatting a removable drive last year and was in a hurry -- the format was taking to long so I hit "cancel", ejected the drive, and inserted another. Then I noticed that the computer still thought it was formating the first drive. Oops. I had just lost years of files and gigabytes of data. More than a little miffed, the drive just sat on my shelf, untouched, until last weekend.
The first thing I did was download the demo for StellarPhoenix. StellarPhoenix took over 24 hours to scan the drive, but when it was done it looked like it could find everything that was missing -- there were GB of recoverable files. However, the interface on the software looked a little unprofessional, so I decided to keep looking, and that's when I found the demo for Data Rescue. The Data Rescue demo scanned the whole drive in 40 minutes and I think that it too found all my files.
My recovery experience: Amazon had the software for $20 cheaper than the publisher, so I bought it. When it arrived it had a nice retail box, a boot DVD, and a guarantee that the boot DVD would work in my machine or it would be replaced for free. Nice!
I reloaded the recovery scan info I saved using the demo and proceeded to restore my stuff. As it restored files, I checked out the recovery folder as files appeared. Now, under OS X, folder/file name is usually unrecoverable -- you only get a bunch of unnamed files back when you try to recover. I remember reading this years ago -- it's a limitation of the files system. However, I don't think Data Rescue prepares the user for that -- or maybe I just skipped past that notification because I was in a hurry (notice a pattern?)
Anyway, the software tried to keep things organized as best as possible: It put similar files into folders (Images, documents, etc.) For the PNG, TIFF & JPEG images, it even put the size of the graphic in the file name, which was a nice touch. It would have been nice if it did the same for the BMP files too. For MP3 and ACC (audio) files, those got generic names too, and it would have been nice if the software could have read the audio file metadata and renamed the files appropriately -- but at least I had them back.
After running this scan -- which was a thorough scan -- I wanted to see if I got everything so I ran a quick scan as well. Quick scan recovered fewer files/folders, but the ones it did had their original names and folder structure. I now have two recovery folders that probably contain overlapping files. However, I'm just happy I got my files back -- I don't want to complain that I have now have too many copies.
ProSoft Data Rescue II (Mac) [OLD VERSION]
3.1 | 36 ratings
Price:
Last update: 07-02-2024
About this item
Data recovery software for recovering files from a problem hard drive
New all Cocoa-based GUI user interface; faster scanning and recovery
Assistant mode and Expert mode operation; drag-and-drop recovery
Supports 10 times more file types for content scans than Data Rescue X
Optimized for Tiger; runs on Panther and Jaguar
New all Cocoa-based GUI user interface; faster scanning and recovery
Assistant mode and Expert mode operation; drag-and-drop recovery
Supports 10 times more file types for content scans than Data Rescue X
Optimized for Tiger; runs on Panther and Jaguar
Top reviews from the United States
Developer
Did the job
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2009K. Klare
Out of date before it is bought.
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2009Jinky Wells
No file names?
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2008David Sweeney
Actually worked!
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2008