Prosoft: Award-Winning hard drive recovery software and utilities

Jascha Kessler


	Having been on Macintosh computers since the first MacPlus in 1984, I had thought I had suffered nearly every sort of accident and/or data disaster. I was saved from most; but I also wasted weeks and months of an all-too short stay on earth recovering and rehabilitating my Other Self: 35+ years of writing and recording, including financial data based records. I wrote "nearly" just now. Little did I know about the ultimate doom: a failing, failing, crashed … and dead master hard drive, alas. For more than a month strange things had been happening to applications and data. Disc Utility fixed and repaired, repaired and fixed. Until about April Fool's Day, it told me I was in trouble, because my Os X.3.9 had exceeded 100 nested folders! Whatever that meant. No one, including Apple techs, could tell me what was wrong. I resorted to Allume's Aladdin utility to find Empty Folders; those arrived by the hundreds. I deleted. That was something I did a few times a week, though the dangerousness recurred. ProSoft's DRIVE GENIUS, in a test version, failed to mount or unmount, whatever the drive, though it could do Rebuild and Repair. It started out by telling me that "S.M.A.R.T." suggested a "Drive Failing." Still, everything went on working, for a month. Working, that is, until 29 April, when Mail began to misbehave. Especially my mail account to the Server at UCLA. I consulted for two hours, and a work-around was set up to help Send and Receive. When I asked the young man what "S.M.A.R.T." meant, he told me it was an acronym for something to do with engineers. When I said that it told me there was a serious, no! a Fatal Hard Drive Error [-2], he said, "Oh, boy, that is serious: it means the drive is going away." Was it ever! Still, the machine worked for an hour — until I tried to install Mac's new OS, Tiger. That installation worked, but not completely: Fonts and Mail, I learned, were not right. But it worked, anyway; for an hour longer. By 4:00 p.m., CRASH PALACE! By that, I mean, the screen went, the machine quit. Darkness covered over the face of the world, to quote Genesis. Darkness before the Creation when those old words were spoken: Fiat Lux! And I was paralyzed I was, that is, no longer in denial. What was there to deny? I was where, as the kids used to say in the 1930s, where Moses was when the lights went out: i.e., IN THE DARK. And darkness ruled all — and that meant 25 years' of work, books and reviews and articles and images, not to mention many updates and upgrades for everything there was collected into 50 gigabytes of 0s/1s. And all the codes and records of purchases and upgrades, et cetera. Those have been there, in the pit of darkness at the core of the world, or as Dante Alighieri puts it, in the last and bottom "malbolge," or frozen circle of the Inferno, right under the anus of Lucifer himself, will know the short of lightning flashes of shock that filled my cranium. My first thought was, "S.M.A.R.T" is smart, whatever that means. The hard drive was no longer failing. It had indeed failed. Life was possible again, if time was short[er] for this user, if and when a new drive was mounted into the G4. Possible, but at the cost of months of labor, and reviewing saved data … 50 gigabytes' worth. Although I know where the shotgun is stored, I didn't think of that, because, well, I was palsied with incipient hysteria. The intelligent thing to do, however, was to drive over to the computer store at UCLA, where the G4 had come from, and talk to them. That talk convinced me that short of buying a new G5 on borrowed thousands, ill-affordable in point of fact, I had to shell out for a drive. There happened to be an Apple rep there, who shook his head and said, Accept your fate: you have to start all over again, if you can install the drive. No question about that: their shop was backed up for ten and more days. I would risk that. He knew no alternative. Now for the finale. I had a trial version of ProSoft Engineering, Inc.'s DATA RESCUE. Why not see what could be done? At 8:00 p.m., I booted the computer, to my astonishment, from an external CD burner. The program appeared. I instructed it to try its best to access the very dead drive somehow [I had been informed that the B Tree was lost] and retrieve whatever data it might find amenable to transfer. Lo, and behole! as Pogo the Possum used to say in the 1940s, it began to work, and was still working along at midnight, when I went to bed offering a prayer to the god of engineering, or His grand-dad, Hephaestus. In the morning, after 10:00, allowing time for a solid breakfast and coffee so as to avoid fainting, I went to the computer and found it still alive. Good, it had worked until 5:00 a.m. Better, it reported that it had actually and truly and really transferred all 50 gigabytes to an external Firewire backup drive! Best, every bit and byte of all 50 gigs proved to be intact, waiting and ready and willing to be copied to the new drive, which I installed in an hour or so of truly amateur anxiety. End of tale: the new drive is working. The data is there and being sorted out and adapted for OS Tiger, a long task, but endurable, considering the alternative! Prosoft Engineering, Inc. worked what I think is a minor miracle. Something I never expected to see happen, even though I am aware that FBI and CIA experts can extract anything from the drives of suspected malefactors. Drives, perhaps. But — failed drives? Its programs for Mac are clear and easy to use by someone, who after 36 years on a Mac is still what is called a Dummy, meaning a layman. I did not believe it was possible to be done after the Apple rep told me, Forget about it all and start life all over. Well, it is not necessary to leave my desk, leave me home, leave my country, and/or leave me myself to live on in misery and gloom — which states of mind are bad not only for the morale, but very bad, even fatal to health too! Five days have past since I found those 50 gigabytes saved, safe and sound. I still tremble at recalling my condition on 29 April when everything went dark. Anyone doing serious work, or trivial, any work at all on a Mac, and nowadays even Dummies are busy with imaging and handling vast quantities of sound and video data, and the rest, will be making the gravest and most careless of mistakes in going a day longer without the extraordinary software utilities ProSoft Engineering, Inc., has just been putting out there. In addition to DATA RESCUE, there is: DRIVE GENIUS, which analyses and rebuilds and optimizes drives, DATA RECYCLER, DATA BACKUP, PICTURE RESCUE [for digital camera disks, too]. I think a daily computer user needs most of these on hand. DATA RESCUE is also made for PC machines. This is a word to the wise, who will be naturally prudent when it comes to all machines and gadgets. My evaluation is: ****, or in the older lingo, A Million Mice! Jascha Kessler,* Mac Associate, SOFTWARE ON REVIEW (www.jaschakessler.com)