Data Rescue 3

If Data Rescue 3 can't recover lost files on your Mac disk, then it's time to send the disk to a high-priced data recovery specialist. Among software solutions, Data Rescue 3 is the last resort for your damaged disk, the app to use when even DiskWarrior ($99.95, 4.5 stars)?our Editors' Choice among Mac disk utilities?can't get your files back. In the same way that DiskInternals NTFS Recovery ($99.95, 4.5 stars) uses brute force to recover data from Windows disks, Data Rescue 3 uses brute force to recover deleted files or files stranded on Mac disks that are physically damaged but still partly readable. In other words, Data Rescue 3 scans every sector of your hard drive, searching for data that looks like a data file or program file, and gives you the option of recovering it. I'm deeply impressed by its ability to recover lost files. I'm less impressed with Data Rescue 3's interface, which displays lots of pointless animations, but made me work far harder than necessary to identify exactly which files I wanted the app to restore to my disk. Still, despite Data Rescue 3's interface flaws, it may prove to be the one program that can bring back your data when you need it.

I didn't have a damaged Mac disk to test with Data Rescue 3, so I tried out its ability to recover deleted files that were no longer accessible in the Recycle Bin. To prevent you from overwriting data that you might want to recover, Data Rescue 3 won't let you install it on your boot drive. I couldn't even install it on a second partition that I use mostly for testing, and I had to plug in an external USB drive before I could use the app at all. I can't really complain about this safety feature, even though it isn't strictly necessary when you only want to scan a single partition on a hard drive and can run the program from a second partition.

Wizard-Driven
I let Data Rescue 3's wizard guide me to a screen where I selected the drive or partition that I wanted to scan, then to a second screen where I selected one of a variety of rescue scenarios. These scenarios include a "quick scan" suitable for minor disk problems, and a "deep scan," which scours a disk for anything that looks like a file, and is the best choice for thoroughly scrambled disks that are otherwise unreadable. I chose a third scenario, a "deleted files" scan that works like a deep scan but only scans disk sectors that the OS has marked as unused. This is the choice to use when your disk is good working order, but you need to recover deleted files or folders that have been removed from the Recycle Bin.

On the 200GB partition that I used for testing, Data Rescue 3 took about an hour to scan for deleted files. At one point, the status bar told me that the app would need more than 500 hours to complete its analysis?which was a bit longer than I wanted to wait?but the status bar quickly changed its mind and told me it would need only forty more minutes. Fortunately, this second estimate proved to be accurate. During those forty minutes, the app displayed a hokey animation of a spinning disk platter beneath a magnifying glass that focused on a flock of ones and zeroes flying across the screen.

What's Recoverable
When the scan was complete, the app got down to business again by displaying a list of filetypes (Office documents, JPEG images, etc.) in a tree-structured list, and I had to click on each filetype to see whether the app had found any recoverable files. This required a lot of clicking before I found the files that I might want to recover. Each recoverable file had an arbitrary letter-and-number filename, because the app had no way of figuring out what the original name might have been. In order to decide whether or not I wanted to recover any of these arbitrarily-named file, I had to click a Preview button at the foot of the list so that, in most cases, I was able to view the first page or two of each file. This quickly got frustrating, and I wish the app had an option to display a Preview pane that might automatically preview each file as I scrolled down the list.

One other limitation of the app's Previewer is that it uses its own preview software, instead of calling on the QuickLook previewer built into recent versions of the Mac OS. I've installed a third-party QuickLook plug-in that lets me use QuickLook to preview WordPerfect files on my Mac, but Data Rescue 3 didn't use this plug-in to preview deleted WordPerfect files, even though it correctly identified the files as WordPerfect documents and restored them correctly. Without a previewer, I had to recover a few dozen files in order to find the one I really wanted.

Interface Woes
Until Data Rescue 3 improves its interface, it's still worth having for its powerful under-the-hood features. For example, one feature that it offers from its menu of recovery scenarios is a cloning feature that duplicates a hard drive to an external disk. The advantage of this is that the original drive may be failing physically, and it may become less readable even while you're trying to restore files from it. By cloning the drive to a new, external drive, you can recover files from the clone without worrying that the drive might fail at any moment. Note that this clone feature works by cloning disk sectors, unlike other Mac cloning software that works by copying files from one disk to another, and can't copy deleted files or damaged directory structures.

Useful for Mac Users
Data Rescue 3 combines high-powered technology with an interface that could stand some improvement. I think any business or organization that relies on multiple Macs ought to have a copy, or least ought to download the free demo and try it out. The demo version can restore only one file of up to 10MB, but will list all the files that could be recovered when you pay for a license and enter the license number into the software. Home users probably don't need to buy a copy until they need one, but you may feel more secure simply to know it's available if and when you need it.

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