It usually takes about five seconds after you empty the trash on your Mac OS X system to realize that a file, document or photo you actually didn’t want to delete was still within. Tragedy! Or is it? Enter Mac Data Recovery from Stellar Phoenix…
Oh, the cold feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that the file you seek, the document you need for the big client presentation Monday morning, your research paper or even just those precious photos of your newborn have vanished. They’re just… gone.
Then you remember how you dragged a folder into the Trash earlier in the week and that it must have contained the file or files you now seek. Darn it!
For the vast majority of Mac users, this is the point when you wish you had a good backup system but likely realize you don’t even have that. You’re up a creek and you don’t even have a boat, let alone a paddle.
Which is why you’ll want to learn about Mac Data Recovery, a remarkably simple, elegant utility from Stellar Phoenix that makes finding and recovering deleted files and documents a breeze. Even if they vanished weeks ago, though to be fair, the longer you wait, the less likely you’ll find the files undamaged.
I’ve actually reviewed Mac Data Recovery before, back in 2012. You can read it here: Review of Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery software. Functionality has definitely improved but the most important update in the interim is to the user interface. It’s definitely better.
Here’s the start screen:
Simple, easy. You can continue exploring a drive or disk you’re salvaging by choosing “Resume Saved Scan”, but since this is our first time running the program, choose “Start New Scan”.
After a moment or two all the drives available are listed:
On my MacBook Pro, “BigHD” is the 500GB SSD drive that it boots from (which is why it shows up first) and “red” is a 128GB SDCard that lives in my SDCard reader slot on the computer and is formatted as an additional drive (rather than as a camera memory card, for example).
There’s an old Microsoft Word document I’d like to try recovering from my hard drive, and if that works, I also want to recover a considerably bigger movie file, an episode of the terrific TV series Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. To proceed, I’ll click on ‘BigHD’, and a number of different choices appear:
My experience with the program is that it’s best to start out with the top option — Recover Data — and then work your way down the list as it proves unable to find what you seek. In particular, if you’re trying to recover photos from a damaged SDCard or similar, “Raw Recovery” can be good, but it’s definitely a tricky task to wade through it all.
I’ll choose “Recover Data” to proceed and it presents two different scan options:
Again, go with the top option to get started, “Quick Scan”.
A click on “Start Scan” and it whirrs away, examining the empty space on the drive where files, folders, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and photographs used to exist but are no more. It takes a few minutes…
When it’s done, lots and lots of data shows up on the screen:
I find this view pretty hard to maneuver, so I suggest you do what I do: click on “File List” on the top left and it’ll neatly organize everything by file type:
You can see here that I’ve chosen “DOCX” documents and it shows a neat list of recoverable (is that a word?) documents that can be examined by name, size, and creation date, along with searched for specific patterns by using the Search function on the top of the window.
Note: since Mac Data Recovery analyzes unallocated data blocks on the drive, sometimes it can figure out the proper filename, creation date, etc, and other times the program can find the data that comprises the file contents but not every other snippet of data associated with it. That’s the challenge faced by all data recover systems, and the more a drive is used, the longer ago the file was deleted, the more you might have to work with partial data.
To recover a specific file or files, simply check the boxes adjacent to them and click “Recover”.
Here’s where the interface takes a bit of getting used to, because it just pops up a window inviting you to select a directory:
Okay, but for what? What’s going on here?
Well, the first thing that will likely happen is that you’ll do what I do: pick the same drive both to recover the data and save the recovered data. That’s a no-no:
If you don’t have multiple drives, you can use a USB flash drive at this point, but you will need a different drive as the destination for your recovery efforts.
Once you’ve picked appropriately, recovery is often lightening fast and the newly recovered file or files show up in a folder called “Root” on the selected drive. If you have a bigger file, you’ll get to see the pieces assembled as part of the recovery task:
And as for me, well, once I recovered the Microsoft Word file and AVI video, here’s what my “Root” folder looked like on the SDCard “red”:
Neatly organized and, as I promised up front, quite easy to work with.
Now to be fair, Mac Data Recovery isn’t an inexpensive program at $99, but as soon as you realize you just deleted a critical file, video, document or spreadsheet, you’ll see the light. And the good news is that you can grab it and scan your drive without licensing, that’s only required once you want to actually recover something.
Stellar Phoenix, Mac Data Recovery. $99.00 and available online.
I am using this software on a corrupted External Hard Drive. I have gotten through the Recover Data stage and all my data shows up in the menu. However, whenever I attempt to recover the data, no matter how large or small, and no matter what drive I attempt to recover it to, I keep getting a pop-up saying that the selected destination has insufficient space. I clearly have the space in all the areas I have tried. Have you run across this, and if so, do you have any idea why this is happening and how I can correct it? Thank you.
Does this help you out? https://www.stellarinfo.com/support/kb/index.php/article/stellar-phoenix-windows-data-recovery-stuck
I’m using this software on a corrupted usb drive. When i try to copy it’s image I get a message saying that there is insufficient disk space. I’ve tried several different location (each with plenty of space) and I keep getting the same message. What’s up with that?
Allan