Customer Reviews
Amazing! 
2007-02-23
As I see it, a hard drive can fail electronically, mechanically, or through data corruption. Data Resue II handles the last scenario perfectly without breaking a sweat.
A little background - I was using TechTool Pro for routine maintenance. It found Volume Structure problems, but upon attempting a repair the drive's directory structure got corrupted. [Don't take this as a swipe at TTP. I've used it for years on my and my client's Macs, and still highly recommend it.] So I had a drive that TTP could list, but the drive would not mount however I tried.
I got a new drive to install the OS on, left the old drive connected and ran Data Rescue II. After a minute or so (!!!!) it showed me all my data on the old drive. I had DR II transfer the data to the new drive and discovered it was pristine - my fear was that my files would just be generic (0001.jpg, 001.mov) and I'd have to rename them all, but the data was ready to use.
I love this product!
Did what it promised it would - how suprising! 2007-01-18
This software did exactly what the literature said it would. The supporting .pdf user's manual was a bit vague in two instances, however quick calls to knowledgeable tech support staff got me going.
Would recommend this product, without hesitation.
This is the kind of resource that public libraries should have in their lending collection.
Hopefully, this is a once in a lifetime need and I have fulfilled my lifetime demand!
Recovering data and peace of mind 2006-07-26
I was frantic when I discovered that I had thrown away 20 years worth of accumulated sermons, letters, articles I'd written, even book manuscripts. (Yes, I know I should have backed up! But I hadn't.) I bought this product, and recovered everything. Simple and elegant. It doesn't take a technician to do it. You can also get it on to a start-up CD, which I would think most users would want to do. My only negative is that my e-mails to ProSoft for promised free technical assistance were cryptic and only marginally helpful. But as it turned out, the software was so easy to use that it didn't matter.
Several things you should know, however:
* The moment you realize you've lost data, you must shut down your computer and restart from the CD or a different drive. Even if you're not actively saving files, applications are constantly writing to the drive in the background, and could overwrite something you've thrown away, making it unrecoverable.
* You must have an external firewire or USB drive. It is not sufficient to be connected to a network--DRII will not work over a network. I was able to borrow a small FW drive, and it worked fine.
* You will not get back your file names. You will, however, get back file types. So you'll know it's a MS word file, but not which MS word file. Which necessitates opening each file and renaming it. This is the tax (along with the roughly $100 to buy the software, plus all your worry) on your stupidity in throwing away your files in the first place. (Note: I think someone could create a utility to streamline that process.)
* You will get back junk you never knew was on there, and that you didn't put there, such as hundreds of foreign language templates and legal disclaimers that Office apparently dumps on to your drive when it first installs, and then erases. (One wonders why it is necessary for Office to do that.)
* Finally, if you're using 10.4 and you want to search those unnamed files by content using the powerful Spotllight search engine, you will have to get Spotlight to index the new files. For some reason, that doesn't happen automatically when you place those recovered files back on your disk from a FW drive. Go to the Spotlight preferences panel, click on the privacy tab, and drag the folders with the recovered data into the privacy panel. Close the preferences window, reopen it, and erase them from that privacy listing. As they come back into the main set of files again, Spotlight will automatically index them. Though this happens in the background, it takes a few minutes and slows things down (a small price to pay.)
It is cheaper right now to buy DRII on Amazon than on the ProSoft website. If you do buy it at ProSoft, don't bother to get the CD package mailed to you if you have a fast connection. Download it, make your own CD, and save $10.
Grate product A++++++++ !!!!!!!!!Saved the day!!!!!!!!! 2006-07-06
I had a drive that would not mount and thought my data was lost forever. But then I found this software that saved the day. Data Rescue II was able to recover all of my music, programs, photos and videos that where on the drive. I also was abal to recover songs and other files that where accidently deleted from the past. My drive is now better then it was before I had the problems.
This software is diffrent becuse it foces the rescue of the data and not the repare of the drive. You may do more damage to your drive and your data if your try to repare your drive
Did the job! 2006-05-01
I'm very impressed with this product. After buying DiskWarrior (which did not work) I downloaded the free trial of Data Rescue and was pleasantly surprised. In about 7 hours it read my severely damaged hard drive and saved thousands of my files. Well worth the price, particularly since it's risk free to buy the trial version.
crashed mac 2008-07-24
this product helped me to recover the great majority of my data for under $85. a well-known corporate entity gave me an estimate of $1500...you can do the math. as far as user-friendly-ness, i ran into what now seems a minor stump, but when i called the number provided with the software, i was quickly helped by a competent representative. this product is worth the money!!!
Use Time machine. 
2008-04-23
Another computer ravaging piece of crapware from prosoft. Like Drive idiot 1 & 2 this product does not work and is totally unessessary. Time Machine with Leopard is awesome and it works. Don't trust prosoft they don't support their products and charge for updates on 2 months after purchase that do nothing for software that does less than nothing.
Great! You can try before you buy 2008-03-01
One of the great things about Data Rescue II is that you can try it before you buy it -- if it won't work for your problem, you don't have to plunk down the money.
Go to Apple's website and type in Data Rescue II, then click the download button to download the Demo copy (on a computer other than the one you're trying to recover data from, so you don't damage your chances of successful recovery).
Burn a disk on the other computer and boot from it on the damaged one to non-invasively scan your drive and tell you what files it finds. The demo will only let you recover one file of size 5 Mb or less.
If it finds the files you're looking for, you can either go to the company website and pay full price for a serial number instantly, or you can pay Amazon's price to wait for Amazon to ship you one.
I'm very grateful this software exists and highly recommend it. My only issue with it has been that for recovering large video files (several GB each) from file system damage, it breaks each video file up into hundreds of individual 3.4 MB files. None of them have reasonable names, so it's a bit time consuming for me to find what I'm looking for and resurrect the video data.
--Beth
Great Mac specific product 
2008-02-09
Finally, great software produced for a Mac computer that is relatively cheap. I purchased the licensed CD ($70 with no tax) from an online store called Other World Computing that sells a lot of Mac product for cheap. I am running an iBook G4, 1.25 GB RAM, 1.33GHz Power PC, with Mac OS X 10.4.11. I was 4% into an erase and reformat of an external Iomega 120 GB hard drive when I realized that I forgot to backup my data onto another hard drive. I cancelled immediately and disconnected the drive after ejecting it. Then after re-connecting the drive, the display said that there was no data showing on the drive. I went online and did some extensive research of data-recovery. This product received good reviews from various sources and was moderately priced compared to other forms of data recovery. Other sources of data recovery costs 2-3x as much.
The product recovered all of my data after two hours of extraction from the 120 GB hard drive. This product only gets four stars out of five, because all of your file names are lost and replaced with random odd numbers and letters. You will have to go through each file and manually re-name them so they will be recognizable. This is a minor inconvenience compared to losing all of your data forever.
ProSoft Data Rescure II (Mac) 2007-03-08
The product did not recover the data on my drive. It spent over 24 hours scanning the drive and then the data it recovered was unusable. I would not buy this product again.
