I don’t often post endorsements for software, but I’ll make an exception for Data Rescue II.
Several months ago, after a particularly bad hard crash, the directory on one of my HDs became corrupted and the drive problematic. After several unsuccessful attempts to repair the drive with Apple’s Disk Utility and fsck, the drive became completely unmountable and its contents – surely undamaged – inaccessible. Although I had backups of my most critical data, due to the size of the disk I hadn’t made recent backups of some important data – mainly personal photos. Since then, I’ve periodically tried to access the disk using a variety of tools, with no success.
Until now. TechTool Pro was absolutely useless – it actually crashed when trying to read the drive! Pathetic. Drive Genius failed with “errors” and DiskWarrior cannot be run on this intel Mac. But Data Rescue II effortlessly recovered the critical data, whole and undamaged, within 10 minutes of first launch. Brilliant performance.
The lesson here, of course, is to back up all the data you value. I’d fallen into the trap of only backing up “business” data – current project files, mail, documents, that kind of thing. I didn’t realise the immense value of my personal data until it disappeared, and although I knew that theoretically it was almost certainly intact, I was still very worried. Of course, in these days of huge storage capacities, backing up one’s data is a herculean task – to fully backup my 1TB+ of online storage would require over 300 DVDs! But compared to the horrendous prospect of losing the data forever, the backup seems like less of a chore and more of an absolutely necessary duty. One of my music drives, for example, lends itself well to backup – a 300G drive which is full, has been full for over a year, and will remain pretty much static until retirement. Backing that up will be a fairly simple matter. Guess that’s something for a coming rainy day.
But back to the software – I wholeheartedly recommend Data Rescue II, it’s extremely impressive, and for just $99 I couldn’t be happier with its performance. I hope you won’t need DR software, but if you do, DRII is the best I’ve seen.