[neg2led]

Alrighty guys and gals!

I've undertaken to review Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery v4.0 from Stellar Information Systems for MacTalk.

It's available here (shameless plug) for $99US:
Mac Recovery Software-Recover Mac Drive-Apple Mac Data Recovery-Data Recovery Mac

It's a relatively small and painless download, 12.3mb - though I wish companies would stop zipping already-compressed DMG files.
Once pulled down, unzipped and mounted (…) you're presented with the usual window - Application to copy, and an alias of the Applications folder.



Copy over the (now ~30mb) StellarPhoenix application and you're ready to go!

Opening the application, it asks for your administrator password (makes sense, it's doing in-depth scanning of your filesystems) and presents you with a license agreement - Which, as usual, nobody reads and is agreed to almost instantly.


(as a sidenote, the agreement can be accessed later on from the application's menu, a rather… daunting 2-page (:O!) PDF)

And, finally, you're presented with the main application window.



All looks well (except for that rather out of place title bar at the top, poor form there) and I'm presented with 5 tabs, each with various options.

Tab one, shown above, is meant for recovering files off drives or even entire drives you've accidentally formatted.



Tab two serves much the same function, but specifically applies to iPods - unfortunately I don't have a compatible device, being that I use an iPhone, so I'll assume it works much the same as on a hard drive - thus being unlikely to restore your lost music. All is not lost however, as it's entirely possible that tab three will help.

Opening tab three abruptly changes you to a new window, with a listing of all your drives, volumes and removable media.



It seems this tab might work best for recovering music files from an iPod, while tab two would work for recovering files stored on it in Disk Mode.

Returning home and clicking the fourth tab, we're presented with this:



This tab is used to restore backup images made on tab 5.



Tab 5 creates a block-by-block copy of your drive or volume (á la the commandline dd utility) for restore later - mentioning that it can be used to recover from a disk with bad blocks.

So, I've given you all these wonderful UI shots - and now you're all wondering, BUT DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK?

Well, lets see, shall we?

Tab one!

First step was to copy a rather large (900mb) zip file to my 2GB USB memory stick, delete it and see what happens when I try to recover it.

I clicked the "deleted file recovery" button and was presented with this:



I selected "DEESK" (my 2GB USB key) and clicked continue, prompted for a quick or deep scan:



Selecting the quick scan, it instantly scanned the drive and gave me a list of all the hidden files it could find.



It worked! now, let's see if it'll restore the file. Checking the box, i'm presented with a hex listing of the file (meaningless mumbo-jumbo to your average user, but the power user might appreciate it) and a now-activated recover button.

Clicking recover, it asks me to select where i want to recover the file to. Selecting my desktop, a progress bar pops up:



Yet seems to go nowhere, never filling even one pixel - This bar is driven by number of files restored, not megabytes - and so does not fill until a few minutes later the entire 900mb file has restored to a folder on my desktop! Bravo.

The original is on my desktop, the restored copy is in a subfolder. I run an MD5 on the two files, and…



Hmm, not the same? So I unzip the two…



And the copy fails to unzip! But this turns out to be a permissions issue - I don't have permission to write files in this directory, a minor bug but still a bug. So, I copy the file to another folder and try again…



And it fails again. Hmm.

Perhaps I put too much pressure on it, after all this is a 900mb zip. So I try again, this time with a 9mb installer for my broadband modem dongle…



And this time it comes out perfectly identical according to the MD5. OK, so it'll restore photos, but it won't restore a CD image. Not too shabby at all - so far, we're up to par with similar windows applications like Undelete.

So, lets try formatting the stick in Disk Utility and seeing what happens. Back at home, I select formatted disk recovery…



I get the same drive-selection prompt as before, and select my 2GB USB stick…





And finally, progress bars! Three of them, actually... I let them fill, and…



Oh lawds. So many folders.

So I use the search bar and….

Found it! restored, MD5'd, works just fine.

All the resource forks of just about everything i've ever put on are there, but nothing significant data-wise except for the most recent files. Also, if you erased the free space on the drive, you won't find anything.

The restore function works as advertised, making a slow block by block copy for sticking on a new drive. Photo/media recovery works the same as regular file recovery, but only pays attention to media filetypes (mp4, jpg, gif, mp3 et cetera.)

Bottom line:

Does it work? Yes, with the usual caveats for this sort of program - if the space the file used to occupy has been overwritten, it won't get it back - and chances are, it won't work on large files. But for your piles of photos, it'll get at least SOME of them back. Remember, if you're recovering things from your boot drive, merely copying the app on and running it will overwrite something.

Would I buy it? Probably not - but I like living on the edge, without backups et al anyway. It works, but I generally don't have issues with this sort of stuff.

Is it worth US$99? Well, that entirely depends on your situation - they offer a free trial, which will show you what could be recovered, and there isn't really any reason to not just download it and stash it away for when you need it, as you inevitably will. If it could recover something worth more than US$100 to you, then by all means buy a key and off you go!

Any questions? Things you'd like me to try?

Thanks y'all!

--neg

[Linux_insidev2]

the unarchiver deletes the ZIP file once complete, perhaps the permissions on the ZIP file are incorrect?

[linkx]

Wonder how would it fare compare to Data Rescue II and Diskwarrior.