Prosoft Engineering excels at creating software you hope you never need. In fact, if you're rigorous with your backups (Prosoft's Data Backup) proactively deal with drive issues (Drive Genius), and think a bit before dragging that group of files and folders to the trash, there's a good chance that you'll never need Data Rescue 3. But the one trait that both humans and computers share is that we both occasionally screw up.
Recovering files, whether they’ve been accidentally deleted or those you need to recover from a dying hard drive is never easy. Scan for a deleted file and you will uncover the thousands of files you’ve trashed. It’s needle-in-a-haystack time. Scanning a problematic drive to recover files is only slightly easier, but you may be dealing with a limited window of opportunity if the drive is really on the way out. No single utility can deal with all these eventualities. What you really need is a complete toolbox. And that’s exactly what Data Rescue is.
Into the Arena When you open Data Rescue, you’ll see all the drives it finds lined up in the Arena view (aptly, if a bit ironically named). There’s also a more conventional Detail view that resembles the hierarchy of physical drives and volumes (the partitions) on the drive, if they can be found. You then move into the next Arena to choose what task to do next. This begins the tricky part and is where Prosoft’s design and documentation skills really come into play. Without a bit of understanding of what’s involved and a basic game plan, you’re in a position to do more harm than good. For example, if you’re simply trying to recover an accidentally deleted file or inadvertently formatted partition, it becomes extremely important to neither add nor delete any files on that partition. If the files you are trying to save are on your startup drive, this can be a problem because the Mac OS is doing a good deal of writing and deleting that is entirely out of your control. Fortunately, your Data Rescue DVD is bootable, so shutting down and launching the program from the DVD is your safest bet.
If you suspect that your drive is having a mechanical problem, you really need to get everything you can off the drive while you can. Data Rescue’s Clone feature is ideal for that. You’ll also need a second hard drive, the same size or larger than the problematic one. (Hint: having a $29 Newer Technology USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter [http://www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php] can be a lifesaver.) If you’re simply trying to recover deleted files, you’ll still want to save those to a secondary storage device.
Smarter Recovery Thoroughly testing a data recovery program presents some challenges to the reviewer. Admittedly, I needed to restrict my evaluations to deleted files and reformatted disks. I created a small, 5GB partition on an external drive and collected a set of copies of a sampling of diverse file types from my system. This ranged from the common to the moderately obscure to the nearly unheard of. The latter was to test out the new FileIQ feature and a full list of supported file types is available on the Prosoft web site. I then tried a delete and then a reformat and, with varying levels of effort, managed to recover virtually all of them.
With File IQ, you literally give Data Rescue 3 a couple of examples of the kind of file that you’re looking for. There are some options that define just how picky the program should be with the identification process and it may take some experimentation as well as spending some extra time with the program’s excellent documentation. These are added to the Content Scan phases of the Deep and Deleted Files scans
The inherent problem with recovering files after a delete or reformat is that they generally loose their filename. You’re left with files with names like D00001.xls. To handle this, Data Rescue 3 apparently takes advantage of Apple’s QuickLook technology and allows you to preview the file without actually leaving the utility (very useful if you’ve booted from the DVD and don’t have access to the original application).
For plist (preference) files and other XML-based documents, identification after the recovery can get a bit tricky and it may take a bit of detective work to establish a positive ID. This is made a bit simpler if you have Apple’s plist editor, which is a component of the Developer Tools install. Our Final Cut Pro project files turned out to be remarkably easy to identify. They faultlessly opened their original projects intact and were ready to be saved with a new name.
Beyond having the most aptly designed package of any utility we’ve seen, Prosoft’s Data Rescue 3 excels as a data recovery tool with an excellent balance of simplicity for an inexperienced user with the advanced features for IT pros. If getting your data back is really critical and you discover your skills may not be up for the task, Data Rescue 3 owners can take advantage of Prosoft’s White Glove Service where you send in your dive and their experts do the work. But having a copy on hand may be useful for those “uh-oh!” moments your Mac informs you that the drive that contains your master’s thesis is not recognized.
