Data Rescue II

reviewed by Eddie Hargreaves

Prosoft had a strong data recovery utility with Data Rescue X, and thanks to improvements to its speed and interface, the Tiger-compatible Data Rescue II is even stronger.

Data Rescue II takes a slightly different approach to the disk utility market by focusing solely on recovering files from a damaged disk and not trying to fix the problem. I've had experiences with the Disk Doctor application of Symantec's Norton Utilities suite where trying to repair a disk resulted in further damage and made the information more difficult to retrieve. So Prosoft's path is a welcome one.

Because of this feature, you are required to have another volume available to recover files to and to use as space for temporary files. This can be any mountable drive or network volume with suitable capacity to accommodate your recovered data.

Another major feature of Data Rescue IIis its ability to see disk volumes that cannot be mounted either in the Finder or even in other disk utility programs. There's nothing quite as soul-sinking as trying to recover a volume and not having it show up in the disk utility software at all. Data Rescue is superior to other utilities in this regard.

Data Rescue II has been updated for Tiger compatibility and ships on a bootable CD that contains OS X 10.4. But like with all utilities that can be run from a bootable CD, it will always work faster when running from a writable hard drive. Since you cannot scan the drive you're booting from, that means you'd need to reboot from the drive you're recovering the files to.

Data Rescue X's scanning was painfully slow, particularly when booted from the CD. But Data Rescue II's scanning, especially the Quick Scan, is much faster. Even booted from the CD, I was able to scan an 80GB drive in less than a minute.

The other downside of Data Rescue X was its unintuitive, ugly metal interface. Although the metal is still there in Data Rescue II, the interface is drastically improved. Buttons are more clearly defined as such, thanks to shadows, and icons are sharper. The all-new Cocoa-based user interface, with built-in features like 'sheets,' makes the application look much more polished and feel more comfortable.

There are two Modes: Assistant and Expert. The first is like a wizard which takes the user step by step through the process and makes everything very clear. The second is more like the original interface except that it opens the results list in a new window that can be searched using the familiar toolbar searchbox introduced in Panther's brushed-metal Finder windows.

Another of its new features is the Deleted Files Scan, which searches only the free space of the selected volume. Because there are no catalog entries for data in the free space area, Data Rescue II uses its Content Scan method to sort recovered files by content. It will sort them into folders named Audio, Documents, Images, Mail, Misc, and Movies. Each one of those folders is filled with subfolders named for more specific filetypes, such as AIFF, AppleWorks, Office, Illustrator EPS, TIFF, etc. The resulting files do not have their original names, so you won't know if it's the file you're looking for, but you can recover every item of that filetype and check them out after you restart.

Because of the large list of file formats that Data Rescue can recognize, it is also a good solution for recovering pictures or songs from removable flash media, such as the cards you use with your digital camera.

With the retreat of Symantec from Mac OS X 10.4 and no major operating system changes expected by Apple for another year, Prosoft Engineering has secured a place in the disk utilities market with the much-improved Data Rescue II, which is the one product to own if you're serious about recovering files from any kind of problematic drive.