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Format: Download or DVD
Developer: Prosoft Engineering, Inc.
System Requirements: 1GHz Processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 or later, 512MB RAM, 21MB hard drive space
Review Computer: 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo aluminum MacBook Pro, 4GB DDR3 RAM
Processor Compatibility: Intel or Power PC
Price: $99.00 single user, $249.00 professional license
Availability: Out now
Demo: .zip file

Data Rescue 3 is an application meant to recover and find data on hard drives regardless of how messed up or corrupted they may be. It can be used to find recently deleted files as well as files that were simply lost, and it promises to be the “safest, most powerful software for data recovery.” In my experience, I found it works pretty well, and the developers put quite a bit of work into their user interface.

Upon launch, the application will inform you that you must have two hard drives available to your computer regardless of whether they are internal. From there, you pick the hard drive you want to recover as well as the hard drive to which you want those recovered files placed. After that, you choose the type of scan you want to perform on the device. They include:

• Quick Scan: This scan takes a few minutes, usually, and can recover existing directory information even if the drive doesn’t mount.
• Deep Scan: This scan takes about 3 minutes per GB, so it should be used in the most severe cases as it finds every recoverable file on the drive.
• Deleted Files Scan: This scan is used to find recently deleted files.
• Clone: This scan clones the drive to another one in order to improve recoverability by scanning the newer drive.
• Analyze: This scan doesn’t attempt to recover data, it only tries to find it.
• FileIQ: This function allows the application to learn new file types.

Once you select your scan, that scan will be performed on your drive as you would expect. Depending on the option you choose and the size of the drive, this process can take from minutes to hours. However, I found it was pretty quick on the drive I used. During the process, a progress bar is shown on the bottom of the interface, and an interesting graphic is displayed near the top. The graphic appears to be crosshairs scanning a virtual hard drive with different file types and binary flying by.

Once the scan is complete, you will be presented with a view much like the one below. These different folders contain various information and files that the scan found. I found it somewhat hard to navigate this interface as far as seeing what data was recovered as it doesn’t use the original directories the file may have been in on your device. That said, when you recover the data, it is much easier to visualize as you can use Quick Look to check it out. To recover the data, all you do is check which folders you want to keep and then tell the program where you want them to be placed. Once that process is done, you’re free to look at them all you want.

I used my 8GB flash drive to test this software mostly because I didn’t have access to any failed or corrupted hard drives to test. That said, it did find a lot more than I was expecting. I only have about five small files on my flash drive, but the recovery found 5+ GB of data to recover. To my surprise, a lot of this data was images and songs I had on my flash drive about a month ago when I was helping a friend move data between computers. I thought this was long gone after I deleted it, but there I was looking at it after the recovery.

It was interesting what happened to the data, though. While the songs played just fine and even had the album art and integrated data still in tact, the images that were recovered were a lot smaller in dimension than those that were deleted. I’m sure this has something to do with how the files are deleted, but I just found it strange that the mp3s could be recovered fully but not the images. Still, it was still nice to see them show up despite their loss of size.

All in all, I’d say the software is really worth it if you have a hard drive from which you need to recover important files. Even at $99, it can be much cheaper than having experts go through the drive, which can commonly cost a couple hundred of dollars to even thousands. The decision basically comes down to how important your data is. In some cases, $99 may be a small price to pay for the priceless pictures and files lost. In others, a simple reformat may be the solution.