Product Description

The best data recovery software for the Mac platform has just gotten better with the new and improved Data Rescue II. Do you have a corrupt hard drive or one that no longer mounts? Are other tools failing to even recognize your bad drive? Data Rescue II is the best data recovery utility on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Other utilities can cause more damage to your hard drive and files by trying to 'fix' the problem, instead of focusing on recovering your files. Do not use a repair utility until you've safely recovered your important files over to a safe location. Data Rescue II should be your first option to recover your important data, before you try any risky "repair" utility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3178 in Software
• Brand: Global Marketing Partners
• Model: 25100
• Released on: 2005-09-19
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .30 pounds

Features

• 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

From the Manufacturer
Do you have a corrupt hard drive or one that no longer mounts? Are other tools failing to even recognize your bad drive? Data Rescue II is the best data-recovery utility on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Other utilities can cause more damage to your hard drive and files by trying to "fix" the problem, instead of focusing on recovering your files. Do not use a repair utility until you've safely recovered your important files over to a safe location. Data Rescue II should be your first option to recover your important data, before you try any risky "repair" utility.

New Features:

• Brand new all Cocoa-based GUI user interface
• Assistant mode and Expert mode operation
• Drag-and-drop recovery and double-click to open single files
• Optimized for Tiger; runs on Panther and Jaguar
• Supports 10 times more file types for content scans than Data Rescue X
• New Deleted Files scan, much faster and more capable for finding deleted files
• Integrated Thorough and Content scans; does both in one scan
• Faster scanning and recovery
• More reliable file recovery algorithms
• Authorization is retained; the user's password is needed only once, when launching the first time

Customer Reviews

Recovering data and peace of mind
I was frantic when I discovered that I had thrown away 20 years worth of accumulated sermons, letters, articles I'd written, even book manuscripts. (Yes, I know I should have backed up! But I hadn't.) I bought this product, and recovered everything. Simple and elegant. It doesn't take a technician to do it. You can also get it on to a start-up CD, which I would think most users would want to do. My only negative is that my e-mails to ProSoft for promised free technical assistance were cryptic and only marginally helpful. But as it turned out, the software was so easy to use that it didn't matter.

Several things you should know, however:

* The moment you realize you've lost data, you must shut down your computer and restart from the CD or a different drive. Even if you're not actively saving files, applications are constantly writing to the drive in the background, and could overwrite something you've thrown away, making it unrecoverable.

* You must have an external firewire or USB drive. It is not sufficient to be connected to a network--DRII will not work over a network. I was able to borrow a small FW drive, and it worked fine.

* You will not get back your file names. You will, however, get back file types. So you'll know it's a MS word file, but not which MS word file. Which necessitates opening each file and renaming it. This is the tax (along with the roughly $100 to buy the software, plus all your worry) on your stupidity in throwing away your files in the first place. (Note: I think someone could create a utility to streamline that process.)

* You will get back junk you never knew was on there, and that you didn't put there, such as hundreds of foreign language templates and legal disclaimers that Office apparently dumps on to your drive when it first installs, and then erases. (One wonders why it is necessary for Office to do that.)

* Finally, if you're using 10.4 and you want to search those unnamed files by content using the powerful Spotllight search engine, you will have to get Spotlight to index the new files. For some reason, that doesn't happen automatically when you place those recovered files back on your disk from a FW drive. Go to the Spotlight preferences panel, click on the privacy tab, and drag the folders with the recovered data into the privacy panel. Close the preferences window, reopen it, and erase them from that privacy listing. As they come back into the main set of files again, Spotlight will automatically index them. Though this happens in the background, it takes a few minutes and slows things down (a small price to pay.)

It is cheaper right now to buy DRII on Amazon than on the ProSoft website. If you do buy it at ProSoft, don't bother to get the CD package mailed to you if you have a fast connection. Download it, make your own CD, and save $10.

Below Standard Customer Service
You can usually tell a lot about a company and it's products if you ever need it's customer service. ProSoft's Data Rescue II comes up short in both product and Customer Service.
One of our company's Intel MacBooks experienced hardrive problems on Friday Aug. 22. In order to try to expedite the data recovery I ordered Data Rescue II from Amazon and received it promptly the following Monday. The Macbook booted from the Data Rescue boot disk and proceeded to scan. It would not recognize the hardrive. I rescanned in expert mode and had similar results. Since there is no manual or paperwork included with the product I visited ProSoft's website and read the manual and FAQ's. I rebooted again and went thru the same motions. Similar results. I'm the company IT guy so I'm not a rookie.
Next step, try customer service...... Customer Service responded immediately with an email suggesting that I contact sales and purchase the "upgrade" that was compatible with Leopard. (It was advertised as Leopard compatible). After downloading the "new" version I found it to be exactly the same disk (v1.2.1) as I had already.
A second request was made of customer service and received basically the same response, suggesting that I contact sales and purchase an upgrade. I can only assume that a real person wasn't responding to the emails or perhaps they would have responded differently.
I'm reluctantly sending the MacBook hardrive to a data recovery service, as time is important in this case. I'm also returning Data Rescue II to Amazon. Perhaps the product would have worked if I had the proper version or if I had an informed response from ProSoft. In any case I've wasted a lot of my time and Amazon's in this folly.
Be sure to examine your options before purchasing this product. Their product MAY work, but their Customer Service gets zero stars.

Should have bought this first!
my imac HD crashed and wouldn't boot. Disk Warrior didn't do anything but eat my $100. Data Rescue did EXACTLY what it said it would. It read the HD and retrieved every single file on my HD. If you need something to work get this!!!