Data Rescue X Description:

Data Rescue X review:
1 stars (Worthless in my situation) - I lost everything on my desktop, which is to say 90 percent of the information I had stored on my 3-month-old iMac G5.



It happened when I tried to open a file on the desktop by double clicking on it. Everything on the desktop except the hard drive icon just disappeared.



An hour on the phone with an Apple tech proved fruitless. He recommended Data Rescue.



I downloaded the demo version, ran it, and came up with nothing. Nevertheless, I ordered the software (from Amazon).



I tried it again, this time making the scans after starting up from the disk. I tried the "Thorough Scan" and the Content Scan."



Each scan took 30-45 minutes to perform and turned up nothing. Oddly enough, when the scans were complete my screen looked as if I had never done them. There was not even a report saying nothing was found.



I guess Data Rescue works well in many situations, but it was a waste of money in my case.
5 stars (The BEST recovery tool for MacOS X) - I'm a very experienced Mac user, and I support over a dozen systems. I have a "toolbox" full of maintenance and repair tools. For years I relied on Norton Utilities, but Data Rescue simply blows away the Norton recovery capabilities, plus, it's MUCH faster and has a better UI.



On two occassions I've used it to salvage most of the files from badly corrupted disks. In one case, it recovered far more than Norton. In the second case, Norton actually crashed trying to process the corrupted disk... without Data Rescue, I would have lost everything on the disk.



I highly recommend this utility.
1 stars (Doesn't work with damaged drives) - This turned out to be more money down the pit. A 250GB WD drive with 3 partitions failed on me, and this product was unable to get more than a few tiny (3MB or less) files from it. Data Rescue X has big problems when it hits a "bad" sector, locking up for a very long time. Out of 140 video files of 50MB up to 1.5GB, only about 8 seconds of the first one was recovered after about 10 hours of processing. In that time the "time left" counter just kept on going up and up until it was into the millions of minutes time left. It just couldn't get past the first file. Very disappointed.