Father Gregory
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I used Data Rescue II to restore some 1.5 GB of files that I had mistakenly deleted about 4 weeks earlier. Unfortunately, the data was on a drive that had to be used on a regular basis, and I did not discover the deletion until some three weeks had elapsed. A little online research (MacAddict; Macintouch) quickly revealed that DRII was the hands-down favorite for my situation. I was fortunate in that all of the files I had to retrieve were a single file type, PDF--one of the many file types that DRII recognizes and recovers. I was unfortunate for having used the volume for some three weeks, which obviously meant that some overwriting of the files was inescapable. With cautious optimism, I gave DRII a try.
The software could not have been easier to use. I placed the drive in question (a Powerbook's boot volume) in target mode and connected it to an iMac on which I had installed DRII. With a few clicks I had worked my way through the dialogue windows of the DRII's Assistant Mode, and DRII was hard at work scanning the Powerbook's HD under its Deleted Files Scan protocol. Some 30 minutes later, DRII was finished and I could look at a listing of the files in a Recovered Files window. A few double clicks allowed me to test some random files, which were good as new, albeit with a nondescript numeric name. The easiest thing for me to do at this point was to save the whole lot on my remote disk, and then go through them at my leisure. Conveniently, DRII sorted the recovered files in separate folders identifying the file type, so it was a snap to zero in on my PDFs. In the end, I would estimate that I retrieved about 90% of my lost data. Of course, I owe it to no one but myself that 10% was lost, since those files were obviously overwritten enough to be damaged or lost. Had I realized my error earlier and immediately stop using the HD until I had acquired DRII, I am confident I would have retrieved 100% of the lost files. I am now forewarned for any future mishaps, for which DRII will without question be my first line of defense! Nice going, Prosoft, for a well-engineered, user friendly, and dramatically productive piece of software! Father Gregory Etna, CA |
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