Here are some simple steps to follow after you’ve accidentally deleted data from your mac hard drive. I spoke with a gentleman that accidentally did that today. After you have deleted data by mistake, you need to limit your activity on the drive.  Even web browsing writes data to the drive, meaning you could be writing over the deleted files you want to get back.  It goes without saying that downloading files is definitely a no no.

Finding software to recover deleted data

When this customer called and said he deleted the wrong document by mistake, I asked him what he’s done since that happened.  He said he panicked and started searching for deleted file recovery software and had downloaded a few different programs to the same hard drive he was trying to recover from.  Unfortunately none of those applications had worked for him and he came across an article by Popular Science recommending Data Rescue 3.

Before downloading data recovery software

I walked him through changing his download location and he downloaded Data Rescue 3 for Mac onto his external drive. We launched the software from the external drive and ran it from there to scan the internal drive. Once the scan was finished then we reviewed the results. He browsed through the folders and then after it looked promising, he marked the folders to recover. The initial activity is critical to recovering data after you have lost it.

Additional resources

Guide for launching Data Rescue 3 from external download location.Prosoft also offers free pre & post sales support, as well as numerous “how-to-guides“.  Contact our support team via email at:  support@prosofteng.com or phone:  925-426-6306

Check out TopTenReviews site.  They recently reviewed the top 8 Mac hard drive data recovery software programs and rated Data Rescue at number one!

The post What To Do After You’ve Deleted Data From Your Mac Hard Drive appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Today I assisted a customer that needed drive recovery help after reinstalling Mac OS X on her MacBook.  She wasn’t aware that the process of reinstalling the OS on her MacBook would completely erase all the files on her hard drive.  She was very upset to see that her pictures and documents were gone.  She found our Data Rescue 3 data recovery software after searching the internet for drive recovery software.

Steps to recover after reinstall

I calmed and reassured her, that I would do everything possible to help guide her through the steps to using Data Rescue 3 to recover her data.  First, I had her download and run Data Rescue 3′s free demo from an external hard drive, then she started a Deep Scan on her internal drive. When the scan finished she was able to go through the Reconstructed Files folder of the scan results to see what was found.  After she was relieved to see her files that were still recoverable.  She then purchased Data Rescue 3 and recovered the files to an external drive.  She sifted through the scan results and was able to find almost all of the files that she had lost from the process of reinstalling Mac OS X.

Recovery after reinstall of OS.

Guide for downloading and launching Data Rescue 3 on an external drive.

The post Drive Recovery After Reinstalling Mac OS X appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

It is a good idea to have a bootable flash Drive with Mountain Lion.  It allows you to do unmount the internal boot drive .  The even more important reason to have the bootable flash drive is for emergency booting or repairing of your Mac’s hard drive. This flash drive will act as a backup in addition to being a second start up drive.  If you have any major corruption or have to replace the drive, then that recovery partition would be useless.

 Steps to Creating a Bootable Mac Flash Drive with Drive Genius 3

In order to create a USB flash drive of Mountain Lion using Drive Genius 3 you will need a flash drives 8GB or larger flash drive.

Open Drive Genius 3 and go to initialize. In initialize give the flash drive a name and choose GUID partition then initialize the second flash drive by following the same steps.

After the flash drive has been formatted now make sure you have the downloaded OS X Mountain Lion Installer.

Use this installer to start the install process. Follow the prompts and when the installer asks to choose the drive, choose the USB flash drive.

Then the installer continues and restarts the mac to continue with the install. After the install finishes then setup your user account and then install Drive Genius 3 current version. Then you will have a Mountain Lion startup disk with Drive Genius 3 on it.

Great Utility to Maintain your Mac

Drive Genius 3 is the best utility to maintain your Mac.  Drive Genius 3 can speed up, clean up and optimize your Mac with these award-winning features;  DrivePulse®, Enhanced Defrag, DriveSlim™, Enhanced Repartition are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 3.

The post Creating a Bootable Mac Flash Drive With Drive Genius 3 Running Mountain Lion appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Weary to Try Data Recovery Software

After she read through many tips on how to use data recovery software online, she learned that it was not recommended to install any additional software when trying to do deleted file recovery.  She was anxious to run a scan just so she could see if the files still resided on the hard drive, but she was afraid to do anything and risk permenantly losing them.  She was on Prosoft’s website and saw that we offered free phone support, so she took advantage of that.  I assisted her with an option to use Data Rescue 3 without installing the software to her hard drive.  I had her use Data Rescue 3 from the install disk and run a deep scan on the internal boot drive of her Mac. We did not want to install anything on the hard drive and run the risk of possibly over-writing the important files she wanted to recover.  She was thankful for the assistance and was looking forward to the results. She had her external hard drive attached that was being utilized for a workspace or destination drive.

Great Data Recovery Software

After the scan had completed she was very impressed and relieved to see the files she had been missing.  She was also very grateful to have the additional and assistance I was able to give her over the phone.

The post How To Run Data Recovery Software Without Installing appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

I spoke with a customer regarding a common issue that I get a lot of support calls on.  This gentleman had a MacBookPro, that he was looking to create a bootable clone for safe keeping in case something were to happen to his main boot drive.  Cloning a Mac and having it bootable would allow him to “restore” and be up and running quickly and efficiently if something were to happen to his main drive.

Cloning a Larger Hard Drive to a Smaller Hard Drive

His main boot drive was 750GB, but only about 80gb was actually being used.  His external hard drive he was looking to clone to was only 120GB.  He had used other cloning software in the past, but the other software had always required the destination hard drive to be bigger than the source.  That would mean he would have to have a 750GB hard drive or larger for it to copy only 80GB worth of data.

 Repartition with Drive Genius 3

My recommendation for him was to startup his Mac with a secondary startup disk.  I recommended that he use our disk utility, Drive Genius 3.  He could use the DVD in order to clone the internal drive. I worked with him to startup his Mac from the Drive Genius 3 DVD and then go to the Duplicate tool.  Drive Genius 3 was not allowing him to clone since it was a smaller drive. I suggested him to make the source volume smaller using the Repartition feature in Drive Genius 3 and then using the smaller volume to clone to a same size drive then. He proceeded to do just that. After the clone finished he was able to verify the clone was bootable by going to startup disk in system preferences.

 Detailed Steps on How to Clone a Larger Mac Drive to a Smaller Mac Drive

Here is a detailed overview on how to duplicate a Larger Volume to a Smaller Volume on a Mac using Drive Genius 3.    

Step 1:  Launch Drive Genius 3 and go to the Duplicate feature.  Then select the volume that you want to clone.

Step 2:  Now go to the Repartition feature. In repartition choose the drive first and then the volume you want to clone. Now hit resize, move the slider all the way to the left to shrink the volume and select resize. Drive Genius 3 gives you warning that this operation could cause data loss—so make sure you have a recent backup. After you have read the warning hit defrag. This will move the data to the smallest possible volume.

Step 3:  Once this process finishes then you will have a volume that can be cloned to our target volume. Drive Genius 3 is a hard drive utility so please be sure to backup your data before you get started.

Ready to Duplicate

Now you can see you will have a partition small enough that you can clone to the larger partition. Next go to Duplicate, choose the source volume and then on the right choose the destination volume.  After selecting start, Drive Genius 3 gives you the data loss warning and the duplicate is started. If this was a bootable partition that you cloned then the destination is going to be bootable too. You can check the volume is bootable by going to startup disk in system preferences.

Check out our website for more info and to learn about Drive Genius 3 Special Offers.

The post Cloning a Mac appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Today I helped a customer that had deleted a mailbox from AppleMail and was hoping to recover it using Data Rescue 3.  She came across Data Rescue 3 after talking to an Apple support rep over the phone.  They mentioned Data Rescue 3 was great for recovering deleted Apple mail files.  When she went to our website she saw that we offered free technical support over the phone, so she decided to make that her first step.  She was very impressed and happy to speak with me once I had her on the call.

First Steps to Recovery

I guided her to starting a Deleted File Scan on her Macintosh HD. She did the scan and then contacted me when the scan had finished.   I helped her locate the AppleMail folder in the Scan Results.  Then she was able to mark the AppleMail folder and chose to recover the files to her external hard drive. When the recovery completed she was able to find the files on her external drive and then imported them back into AppleMail where she began to reorganize her mailboxes.  She was very relieved and happy to have the assistance.

 More about Deleted File Recovery

In OS X, when a file is deleted, and the trash is emptied, the file’s name and folder information is usually erased by the system, and is therefore irretrievably lost. However in most cases, the most important part of the file — its contents — are still present on the disk. The task of deleted file recovery requires algorithms that are tailored to each specific file type. Data Rescue 3 is the Mac industry’s best data recovery software and works when many other utilities fail.

Try the free demo to get a preview of the files that are recoverable or contact our technical support team for free assistance.

The post Recovering Deleted Apple Mail appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

 As a support rep for a data recovery software company, the most common support call I receive is…. “I deleted data from my computer, what can I do to recover it?”

Recovering Lost Data

Here are some simple steps to follow after you’ve mistakenly deleted data from your hard drive.  I spoke with a gentleman that accidentally did that today.  After you have deleted data by mistake, you need to limit your activity on the drive.   Even web browsing writes data to the drive, meaning you could be writing over the deleted files you want to get back.  It goes without saying that downloading files is definitely a no no. When this customer called and said he deleted the wrong document by mistake, I asked him what he’s done since that happened. He had already downloaded some hard drive recovery software on to the same hard drive, but that software did not work.

A Key Step to Deleted File Recovery

I walked him through changing his download location and he downloaded Data Rescue 3 for Mac onto his external drive. We launched the software from the external drive and ran it from there to scan the internal drive. Once the scan was finished then we reviewed the results. He browsed through the folders and then after it looked promising, he marked the folders to recover. The initial activity is critical to recovering data after you have lost it.  If you don’t follow these steps you will make recovering that single deleted file impossible.

Guide for launching Data Rescue 3 from external download location.

More Info About Data Rescue 3

Data Rescue 3 works even when your hard drive fails to mount or boot. Data Rescue is the most-awarded, most-used hard drive recovery software for the Mac. Data Rescue is even used by data recovery specialists, forensic recovery teams and IT groups worldwide. Data Rescue is easy-to-use deleted file and hard drive recovery in a box!

The post Recovering Deleted Files appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Today I helped a customer that was in need of data recovery software.  He had a problem with his Mac hard drive that was no longer mounting and he had all his important information that was not backed up.  He decided to download and try the free demo version of Data Rescue 3 for Mac.  He was going to see if he could recover his files on his own.

Using Data Rescue for Mac

The customer explained he started the Deep Scan, but then it failed immediately stating  it was “unable to find any files” so he was not sure what to do.  He was glad to have the option to contact Prosoft’s FREE technical support team for further assistance.

Reverse Clone

One of the unique features of Data Rescue 3 is Reverse Clone.  I was able to help him start a Reverse Clone of his hard drive.  The purpose of the clone is to help overcome any slow reads or possible hardware failures that exist on the original Mac hard drive. When the clone finished he was able to successfully run a Deep Scan on the clone and then recovered his data to another drive.  He was very happy to have recovered his files using Data Rescue 3 for Mac.  In the future he was going to make sure to backup his files using our Mac backup software…Data Backup 3.

Self-help Tutorials

Prosoft is continually updating and creating self-guided tutorials on the most popular “how-tos” using our data recovery and disk utilities.  If you don’t find what you are looking for or need further assistance we encourage you to contact our Free tech support team at 925-426-6306.  Or download the free trial version of Data Rescue 3.

Reverse Clone Steps:

The post Help using data recovery software appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Today I helped a customer use Drive Genius 3 to repair an error on the Macintosh HD volume of his Mac. He had received warnings from DrivePulse that this volume had errors and needed to be repaired.

Features of DrivePulse®

DrivePulse is a feature of Drive Genius 3 that monitors the health of your hard drive when your computer is idle for more than 5 minutes.  It has the ability to quickly check your drive for any errors, fragmentation or bad blocks.  It is a great way to monitor the health of your Mac hard drive before any big problems can arise.

Troubleshooting with Drive Genius 3

He had first opened Drive Genius 3 and went to the Repair feature, but this function was grayed.  Next he ran Verify and Repair Permissions instead, but he continued to see warnings from DrivePulse.  He was not sure what to do next since the Repair option was grayed out, so he contacted our Free support team for advice.

Unmount for Volume Repair

I talked to him and explained why Repair was grayed out. This is because a volume must be unmounted in order to run Repair.  In this case since his Macintosh HD was his primary startup volume, he must startup from another device in order to run the Repair. He had a Late 2011 model MacBook Pro and he did have a Clone Backup of his hard drive. He was able to startup from the Clone, open Drive Genius 3 and run the Repair on his Macintosh HD.  He was glad that he was able to perform the volume repair and fix the issue, thankfully DrivePulse detected the problem before it became a more serious issue.

Award-Winning Disk Utility

Drive Genius 3 is the best mac hard drive utility on the Mac platform.  Speed up, Clean up and Optimize your Mac with these award-winning features:  DrivePulse, Enhanced Defrag, DriveSlim, Enhanced Repartition are only a few of the features of Drive Genius 3.

The post Volume Repair with Drive Genius 3 appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.

Deleted File Recovery Using Data Rescue 3

I guided her in with the steps to start recovering her deleted files using Data Rescue 3.  The first step was starting a new scan in Data Rescue 3, she selected her internal hard drive as the source to be scanned.

Step 2 to Deleted File Recovery

Then I directed her to choose the Deleted Files Scan as the task she would run.  Then she connected her external hard drive and chose that as her workspace for the scan.

Step 3 Recovering the Files

When the scan finished she opened the Reconstructed Files folder and saw that there were a lot of images that were found.  She selected all of the JPEG folders for recovery and began recovering them to her external hard drive. When the recovery finished she was very happy as she was able to find most of the pictures that she had lost.  She finished going through all the recovered files and is now in the process of reimporting all of her pictures back into her iPhoto library.

Info About Recovering Deleted Files

If you delete a file, by dragging it into the trash and then emptying it when you are on a Mac the file’s name and folder information is usually erased by the system, and is therefore irretrievably lost.  However in most cases, the most important part of the file, its contents are still present on the drive.

Data Rescue 3 enhances your ability to find deleted files in another way: the Deleted Files Scan scans only the free space portion of your mac hard drive, greatly reducing the number of files that you must look for to find particular ones.

The post Deleted file recovery appeared first on Prosoft Engineering.