Losing data sucks. Your spreadsheets from work are one thing, but the truly heart-wrenching losses are the things you can’t replace: pictures of your kids at Disneyland, the Great American Novel you’ve been working on since college, or your 300GB iTunes Library that you’ve been lovingly curating for the last decade. Luckily, tools like Prosoft’s Data Rescue can help get your data back whether you lost it to file corruption or simply to being overzealous with the Empty Trash command (we’ve all done that at least once).

3D Arena View is cool the first time, but it quickly becomes distracting eye candy. We preferred the Detail View.

When you fire up Data Rescue for the first time, you’re dropped into Arena View, which presents you with an animated 3D menu of the application’s main functions--or you can use the Detail View button for a more traditional list. Unlike disk-repair tools, which try to fix problems, Data Rescue is focused on data recovery. So if you don’t have a Mac Pro with a secondary internal drive, the app prompts you to attach an external drive, and either way, Data Rescue uses that second drive as a place to write recovered data. Recovering to another drive helps protect your data by ensuring that your Mac doesn’t write over something you might want to recover.

Basic operations include different levels of scans to recover data, a Clone feature useful for duping entire drives, and the new FileIQ feature, which you can use to teach Data Rescue to read proprietary file types that it doesn’t recognize out of the box. When scanning a drive, you can opt for a Quick Scan, Deep Scan, or Deleted Files Scan. The Quick version is faster than the other two, as you’d expect, and the Deleted Files scan restricts itself to free space on your drive, so it’s best used for files you’ve accidentally emptied from the trash.

The Clone feature is designed for instances where you suspect there are mechanical problems with the drive itself. Data Rescue can clone the dying drive to another disk, and then you can recover data from that copy, which reduces wear and tear on a drive that’s already in dire straits. Once you complete a scan, Data Rescue presents you with a list of files it found, and you can pick and choose which files to restore to your secondary drive.

We tested several scenarios where we deleted files and otherwise destroyed them to test Data Rescue’s chops. We easily recovered deleted files, and were even able to recover the contents of files that we deliberately made unreadable. Data Rescue even mounted a troubled drive that the Finder had given up on months ago. One caveat: Data Rescue turns up lots of data, but filenames are often lost. A Quick Look–style Preview button lets you see the contents of files to help with deciding which ones to select for recovery. It can be painstaking finding what you’re looking for, but investing some time for this manual sorting is better than losing something important forever.

While the software itself is easy to use, be warned that intensive data-recovery operations are going to take a while. It took nearly two hours to scan the free space on our MacBook Pro with a 160 GB drive--anything larger than that, and you’re really better off setting Data Rescue to run overnight. And it bears mentioning that having a copy of Data Rescue handy is not the same as sticking to a good backup strategy.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to use Data Rescue. But recovering important data just once is well worth its price.

Data Rescue 3
COMPANY: Prosoft
CONTACT: www.prosofteng.com
PRICE: $99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.11 or later, secondary drive to recover files to
Can resurrect borked files and drives. FileIQ feature can learn to work with obscure file types.
Isn't foolproof (but nothing ever is). Scans can take a long time, depending on the amount of data and state of your drive.