Friday night I arrived home to find my not-yet-three-month-old iMac’s screen blank and the hard drive making unhealthy clicking noises. No amount of poking or prodding on the keyboard or mouse would rouse it.
After trying all the usual suggested fixes, spending a couple of hours on the phone with Apple support, and two failed Archive and Install attempts, it looked like it was game over for my hard drive. The Genius1 at my local Apple Genius Bar confirmed my suspicions and ordered me a new drive.
But what about all my data? Naturally I haven’t learned my lesson after the last two hard drive failures, and backups were something I’d “get to soon.” Apple doesn’t do data recovery when they replace hard drives, however my Genius suggested I try Data Rescue II. I’ll admit I was skeptical at first, but three months worth of data didn’t seem worth the $500 to $5000 professional data recovery can cost.
With Data Rescue II and an external USB hard drive, I got to work.
Data Rescue II comes on a bootable CD, so getting it up and running is as simple as starting up from the CD. The Quick Scan in Expert mode was enough to find all my files and finished in well under 30 minutes2. From there it was a matter of selecting the files I wanted to recover, plugging in my USB hard drive3, and choosing where to save the recovered files. Saving close to 200GB of files over a USB2 cable takes a long time, but the next morning everything was safely recovered. A random sampling of the recovered files confirmed they were still intact.
Data Rescue II is easily the best $115 I’ve spent on software. Perhaps second only to the backup software I’ll get to buying soon.
1 Is this what they’re supposed to be called? How about Bar Tender?
2 This can vary greatly with the type of damage. More thorough scans can take up to several hours or even days.
3 Which was conveniently auto-detected.
