EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Review

Sometimes a company, despite its history and best intentions, takes a risk, promising more than it can deliver, or at least not doing enough quality assurance testing to match what it sold its customer. Such is the case with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac (version 17.2.0 at the time of testing), the Mac port of the tried-and-true Windows recovery software.

Simply download Data Recovery Wizard for Mac, install it, assign full permissions to the hard drive, and you’re good to go. Data Recovery Wizard is available in a free version with a 2GB data recovery limit, as well as a paid version, which offers additional features such as one-on-one remote assistance, is available as a free trial, and requires Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or later to run. The paid version is available for $89.95/£95.99 per month for a single Mac license, $119.95/£131.99 per year for a single Mac license, or $169.95/£179.99 for a lifetime upgrade plan with a single Mac license. Monthly and annual license payments renew automatically, so you may need to check this after a trial period.

Data Recovery Wizard software supports over 1,000 file types for data recovery and offers specific modules for SD cards, cloud recovery and storage, a non-bootable Mac module that boots from an external server for data recovery, a video repair module, and a disk backup module that can save volumes as .dmg image files. The application also supports APFS, HFS+, HFS, XFAT, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS formats, making it convenient for working with Windows and Linux machine drives. A useful record search tool also keeps track of past scans and lets you retrieve and use them later.

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Data Recovery Wizard’s core features of data recovery, reconstruction, and organization are its strong points. A user-friendly interface guides the user to choose the volume to recover and designates the target recovery drive and/or folder. Then, the program easily identifies the drive, initiates the recovery process, and organizes the recovered and restored data into categories such as All Types, Images, Documents, Audio, Videos, Emails, Archives, and Others, which is a boon for users looking to put their restored data in a logical order once it is back from the dead.

The SD Card feature is equally useful, while the iCloud module makes it easier to sign in to iCloud, which requires two-factor authentication to log in and work with your data. The Video Repair module was also a nice surprise, and it was fun to drag and drop a folder full of decades-old family videos into the engine and export cleaner copies of the videos to share later.

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However, there are some issues that require immediate attention. The Unbootable Mac module is one of the most prominent ones. It requires the user to shut down their Mac, boot into recovery mode, and then boot from an external server managed by EaseUS. While this is a good idea in theory, the tool entered a continuous loop of being unable to mount the internal and external drives of my M2 Mac Studio. I let this process run overnight, and when I woke up in the morning, the drives were still unmounted and the tool was unusable. This, along with the cloud tool’s inability to successfully connect to Dropbox for recovery (the app failed to present a current user login screen and only offered an account sign-up menu), and the app requiring an administrator password every time I launched Data Recovery Wizard even after granting it full permissions on my Mac, and the software presenting a customer satisfaction survey every time I quit the program, was nothing short of infuriating.

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Should you buy Data Recovery Wizard for Mac?

Data Recovery Wizard for Mac excels in its basic functions and presents an attractive way to recover data from Mac, Windows and Linux volumes with a nice range of supported platforms and file formats, but some things can’t be ignored. The high price is shocking, the unbootable Mac module completely failed and maybe Apple and EaseUS should work together so that an administrator password isn’t required every time the application is launched. And no, no one in their right mind wants to be presented with a customer satisfaction survey window that needs to be closed every time they exit an application, because that’s the kind of thing that makes reasonable human beings hate, loathe and despise marketing departments.

The truth is that while there are some great tools here, EaseUS tried to make it a Swiss Army knife utility without doing enough testing to see if everything worked properly. Granted, Data Recovery Wizard for Mac is part of a wide range of products that EaseUS makes and sells, and it only represents a moderate portion of its revenue stream, so perhaps some QA testing failed before version 17.2.0 was released to the public. Still, seeing the unbootable Mac feature fail completely was disconcerting, and given that it’s a major selling point, EaseUS needs to look into what’s going on and work to fix it. While it’s a good utility, there are other worthy options that have been tested, debugged, and proven without putting the user in a situation where a hoped-for viable solution completely fails, making a bad situation even worse.

Take a look at our roundup of the best data recovery apps for Mac for alternatives.