Data Rescue 6 Review | igamesnews

Nothing is free, especially when it comes to data recovery. For longtime fans of Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue software, which is currently at version 6.0.8 at the time of writing, the developers have added some excellent disk management and data recovery features, albeit at a hefty price for casual users.

Like its predecessors, Data Rescue 6 is easy to download from Prosoft’s website, and once you’ve granted the application full access to your hard drive, you’re ready to go. The software can be used as a trial version and can scan a hard drive and recover up to 1GB of data for free. Beyond that, things start to add up, with the company charging a fee of $19 per individual unlicensed data recovery, $79/£74.32 for a standard license that offers unlimited data recovery for up to 30 days, and a $399/£375.34 per year professional license that offers unlimited recovery for a single year. That’s just the beginning, as the hefty fee only covers a single Mac or Windows PC, and the auto-renewal option will need to be turned off from your web-based Prosoft account, lest your credit or debit card be hit at some point. The high price may of course seem insignificant depending on the value of the data you are trying to recover.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

As with previous versions of Data Rescue, once you accept the price, you get a compelling set of tools to work with. It’s easy enough to perform a quick scan or a deep scan, view hex tables, perform a secure erase, set drive parameters, manage a virtual RAID configuration, and work with numbered sectors on drives as well as allocation blocks. The software’s scan management lets you work with up to 15 scans, pausing and resuming them as needed, which is handy if you’ve already invested several hours in a deep scan. Pop a hard drive into an external media, mount it in Data Rescue 6, and it’s easy to start scanning the drive, assign a recovery folder, and begin extracting data as well as reconstructing data as needed.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Sure, there are limitations, and if the drive fails mechanically, it will be that much harder to extract and reconstruct the data, but the software gets to work, works well in the background, and doesn’t hold back when it comes to harvesting and reconstructing everything it can.

One of the best things about recent versions of Data Rescue has been its ability to create clone and recovery drives, and Data Rescue 6 does this well, albeit with some caveats. Cloning from one drive to another was rock solid, with different data strategies (such as Straight, Reverse, Bisect, and Segment), and the software handled this well. Creating a recovery drive from a volume partition or macOS installer file was straightforward, but Data Rescue 6.0.8 does not currently offer an option to create a macOS Sonoma recovery drive, which is concerning given that version of the operating system has been out for ten months at the time of this review.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

The more technical tools in Data Rescue 6 are numerous and can get you into trouble if you’re not sure what you’re doing. Setting incorrect drive settings or a boot point can leave you having to troubleshoot this issue. While it’s nice to have these tools available, you should read up on them before using them.

While Data Rescue 6 has some great tools and has become a part of my daily routine for data recovery for tech clients, there are a few things that Prosoft needs to address. Attempts to contact the company for support and technical questions have gone nowhere, the current lack of an option to create a macOS Sonoma recovery drive raises eyebrows, and the fact that the software was last updated in 2023 is concerning. Yes, the company has other applications to support and sell, but it also charges a hefty price tag to its users, who in turn use it for the extremely critical function of trying to recover their data before the drives they are working on mechanically fail to the point where the data can no longer be recovered.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Data Rescue 6 supports older versions of macOS and only requires macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later to install and run, but with more than six months having passed since its last update, it feels like Prosoft’s attention has shifted elsewhere.

Verdict

There’s a great set of tools here that I generally swear by, but a lack of customer focus and responsiveness can strain the relationship between any software company and even its most loyal customers. This, combined with a high subscription price that casual/intermittent users may not be prepared for, and the lack of a good tutorial system, means that Prosoft is shooting itself in the foot when it doesn’t need to. These aren’t epic fixes that need to be made, and there’s no need to go back to formula, but there are times when a company needs to offer better support, if only to be in a better position to deliver a great product that can actually help those who need it.

Find out how Data Rescue compares to other data recovery apps for Mac in our roundup.