|
22 March 2010
Posted in
Utilities
We all from time to time have deleted data we wish we hadn't and wished there was a way we could get the data back! Thanks to Stellar Phoenix Macintosh 4.0 data recovery software by Stellar Information Systems, it is now possible to get deleted data back.
The product is available as an 11 megabyte disk image file which is readily downloadable from the Stellar website either on a trial basis or after purchasing a license key. Installation and registration of the software is, as you would expect from a Macintosh, easy and quick with a drag and a drop from the disk image file to your Applications folder.
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx
$ 99 USD
Software/Hardware Requirements
Difficult to find on website. The downloadable manual lists Windows software specs as the requirements!
Available from
www.macintosh-data-recovery.com
The menu for the software is easy to use and provides a number of different options
- Quick Recovery
- Deleted File Recovery
- Formatted Media/Lost Media Recovery
- Search Lost/Deleted Volumes
It also provides specialist recovery functionality like iPod Recovery and Photo Recovery.
For the purposes of this review I selected the deleted file recovery function just to see how easy it is to recover accidentally deleted files quickly. Selecting what drive to scan was easy with the wizard interface that the software provides.
The scan then kicks off...
The scan of the Macintosh HD took just over 12 minutes on my 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM and found 1.1GB of recoverable data. Obviously the scan will be quicker if you have a faster processor and more RAM.
Available recoverable files are sorted by file type...
Microsoft Word files were selected to be recovered to an external USB drive. When the recover button is pressed an external drive can be selected to restore to.
The files are listed in the Finder ready to be accessed. The restore was very quick.
A number of the Word files restored were earlier versions of this review.
I quickly looked at the Quick File Recovery option and even though this was quick to scan the drives, it was not easy to recover files using this option and would require further experimentation into how to use this as a recovery tool.
As with most software products there is room for improvement. There are a few progress bars that do not tell you how much time is left both when running a scan or recovering data and you have to restore data to external drive which isn't very convenient if you do not have an external drive handy. Original file names are not kept when files are restored.
There are some good points, however. Each feature tells you what it does on the main menu. Scan recovery points can be saved so scans can be resumed or loaded instead of having to start the scan from the beginning. The software also logs thoroughly which is good.
Overall this looks to be a good tool for file recovery and this review only touches the surface of this tool. However, this tool isn't recommended for novice Mac users and would take a bit of learning in order to get the full experience from this tool.
Note from Philip Roy - In editing this article for publication, I attempted to find the technical requirements of the software. This was difficult to find. The support pages produced errors and the downloadable User Guide features Windows specifications as the minimum requirements and screen shots from Windows XP. Not appropriate for a Mac user guide at all!
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/hide comments
Philip Roy
said:
 |
The vendor has pointed out that the requirements for the software can be found at.... http://www.macintosh-data-reco...covery.php Processor : Intel Power PC (G4 or later) |
Show/hide comment form