ntfs

Despite the advancements in virtualization technologies, Boot Camp is still the best option for compatibility and overall speed when you want to run Windows programs on your Apple hardware. This will arguably always be the case, but while speed is a perk, native support for NTFS in OS X and HFS in Windows prevents quick file transfer both to and from the partitions.… Read more

Compatibility with Microsoft's NTFS filesystem is sometimes necessary for people who use either separate PCs or Boot Camp. While Apple offers a driver to read NTFS volumes, by default it will not write to them. To overcome this, there are several third-party NTFS drivers available, but in Snow Leopard you can set Apple's built-in driver to write to NTFS as well.… Read more

In order to implement full support for the NTFS file system, you will need to install third-party software. While Apple allows you to read NTFS drives on Macs, the ability to both write to these drives and format drives for NTFS are not included in OS X. NTFS-3G is one popular option for managing NTFS partitions in OS X; however, if you have had it installed you may run into an issue where Disk Utility will give you an error when you try to format a drive to NTFS.… Read more

When it comes to full read and write support for windows drives, OS X can only do so on FAT32-formatted partitions. The newer and popular NTFS format is a more stable option for Bootcamp and other applications; however, it is only readable by OS X. One of Apple's selling points for OS X is the enhanced Windows compatibility, but the lack of write ability to NTFS drives makes transferring files between the Mac OS and Bootcamp rather cumbersome. Luckily, third-party utilities enable this missing feature.… Read more

iUndelete is an easy-to-use utility that allows users to recover deleted documents. Although it won't work miracles, users stand a good chance of recovering lost data with this program.

The program's interface is simple and intuitive, allowing us to get started right away. For testing purposes, we created a Word document and deleted it. We hadn't emptied our Recycle Bin in a while either, so we did that, too. Then we clicked the Scan button and the program went to work. It quickly returned a list of the deleted files it had found, organized in a tree … Read more

Just as its name suggests, DataRecovery aims to recovery files that had been deleted, including compressed and encrypted files. It also claims to wipe files so that they cannot be recovered. However, we were not impressed by its unintuitive, amateurish user interface.

The user interface offers very little direction with its vague commands. It consists of three commands--Scan, Wipe, and Recover. There are no other settings or configurations. We selected a hard drive and clicked the Scan button. The program did scan our computer very quickly, but a window popped up that was difficult to decipher. It had something to … Read more

Accidentally deleted your files? GetDataBack Data Recovery can track them down--for a price. It even works with corrupted drives and those not recognized by Windows. This version only recovers files from NTFS drives, but it does offer a search tool for quickly locating a file by its date, name, or size.

If you suspect your actual disk is about to bite the dust, you can create a drive image to use during recovery. The utility can't make rescue discs, however, so if you want to do that, you'll need to build yourself a bootable Windows PE disc and … Read more

Let's be honest. There's a lot to like about Microsoft Windows, and there's a lot that doesn't measure up. Local search can be filed in the latter category.

Too long have we been forced to endure slow and painful Windows Explorer searches or install a resource hog like Google Desktop to make up for what Windows lacks. A simple program called Everything, from small software publisher voidtools, aims to change all that.

With a simple interface and blazing speed, Everything does mostly one thing, and it does it extremely well. It creates a near-instant index of … Read more