Customer Reviews

ProSoft Data Rescue II (Mac) [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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!!!

As I see it, a hard drive can fail electronically, mechanically, or through data corruption. Data Resue II handles the last scenario perfectly without breaking a sweat.

A little background - I was using TechTool Pro for routine maintenance. It found Volume Structure problems, but upon attempting a repair the drive's directory structure got corrupted. [Don't take this as a swipe at TTP. I've used it for years on my and my client's Macs, and still highly recommend it.] So I had a drive that TTP could list, but the drive would not mount however I tried.

I got a new drive to install the OS on, left the old drive connected and ran Data Rescue II. After a minute or so (!!!!) it showed me all my data on the old drive. I had DR II transfer the data to the new drive and discovered it was pristine - my fear was that my files would just be generic (0001.jpg, 001.mov) and I'd have to rename them all, but the data was ready to use.

I love this product!

I'm very impressed with this product. After buying DiskWarrior (which did not work) I downloaded the free trial of Data Rescue and was pleasantly surprised. In about 7 hours it read my severely damaged hard drive and saved thousands of my files. Well worth the price, particularly since it's risk free to buy the trial version.

I had a drive that would not mount and thought my data was lost forever. But then I found this software that saved the day. Data Rescue II was able to recover all of my music, programs, photos and videos that where on the drive. I also was abal to recover songs and other files that where accidently deleted from the past. My drive is now better then it was before I had the problems.

This software is diffrent becuse it foces the rescue of the data and not the repare of the drive. You may do more damage to your drive and your data if your try to repare your drive

I can't say enough about how grateful I am for this software. It was able to recover in a few hours what DiskWarrior could not find over several days of scanning. Get the free demo, run a scan to be sure it works, then you can buy the full version to recover all your files. This will save you from wasting money on products that might not work.

I had a slight mechanical problem with my hard-drive which rendered it useless, I then got a quote for GB£800 to fix the drive from a data retrieval agency.

I decided to give this software a try, though I really did not expect anything from it.

It worked. I recovered years of important work and I now realise how lucky I have been.

I highly recommend this program but I can imagine that it may not work in all situations. It took a really long time to operate, about 2 days total but as you can imagine, was totally worth it. My only gripe, is that while running, the user interface feedback window is frustratingly minimal and you really have no idea what to expect. Whatever algorithm is used to calculate the estimated finishing time is a little shoddy, so don't rely on it, at all.

It gets 5 stars for doing what it promised....minus 1 for hiding its thoughts from me.

This software did exactly what the literature said it would. The supporting .pdf user's manual was a bit vague in two instances, however quick calls to knowledgeable tech support staff got me going.

Would recommend this product, without hesitation.

This is the kind of resource that public libraries should have in their lending collection.

Hopefully, this is a once in a lifetime need and I have fulfilled my lifetime demand!

So many reviewers have added lengthy and detailed descriptions of personal experiences with data loss and its recovery with ProSoft's Data Rescue that I won't bore you with mine, except to say:

1) All of the positive reviews are true. This is an excellent and amazing product, and does what it says;

2) The technical support by phone and email is amazingly fast, courteous and helpful, especially in my experiences with Michael in Technical Support.

I am now going forward to see whether their "Data Rescue Center" can help me with a hard disk which is physically click-click dead and can't spin up to be seen by Data Rescue but which also contains data I would like to recover.