Data Rescue 2.0.2: Wow!

Data Rescue (first mentioned here last time) has been updated to version 2.0.2. We continue to get glowing reports about it from readers. Here's are two examples:

Riley Werts: "Put me in the column that endorses Data Rescue. Part of my job is trying to ensure the integrity of the literally thousands of 5.25" MOs in our job archives. As stable as MOs are, occasionally one gets trashed by a misbehaving drive. Usually Norton Disk Doctor can fix it and we go on. But I have a stack of about six or eight that nothing seems to be able to help. Then I saw the note about Data Rescue on MacFixIt. I immediately downloaded the demo, and about 15 minutes later, I was looking at the first recovered file in Photoshop, preview icon and all. After several other successful tests (and no failures!) on as many volumes, and recovering files worth many times the program's purchase price, I was satisfied."

Darron Froese: "I have had great results with Data Rescue. Both I and a colleague have had crashed HFS drives for about 2 months now - nothing could get them to mount or work at all: Disk First Aid 8.1, 8.2, 8.5b, TechToolPro 2.0.3, Norton Beta, MacMedic - none of them worked. This program showed me my entire directory structure and I was able to recover my Mail database - the only thing not backed up recently. When I register it, I'm going to be able to get the whole drive back. My colleague had a similar experience."

As compared to utilities such as Norton Utilities and MacMedic, Data Rescue has no disk repair function. It only does file recovery. And it is unlikely that it can recover accidentally deleted files; it is mainly for recovering data from crashed disks where the files are otherwise inaccessible. But it appears to excel at this task. Combine it with Disk First Aid (which does do repairs) and you have both repair and recovery for a very reasonable price.

Update: Bart Windrum notes: "Data Rescue's default RAM partition is too small to allow the program to create it's allocation block info on even a 2G HFS partition. Unfortunately it won't tell you so until after it's gone through the lengthy scanning process and begun doing its allocation thing." So increase its Preferred Memory size before scanning, if you have the memory to spare.