Data Recovery Essential 4+

My external hard drive worked fine (and still does), but somehow all the files went missing in just one folder. It is an older drive and I had a couple different docs open at the same time, but it was weird. Did a little data recovery research and went with this app due to the ratings and because my problem obviously wasn’t a hardware issue. Made the disk image through Terminal and ran it through the app. It found all my missing files and recovered them… but ZERO of the “recovered” documents will open. They’re all there (albeit scattered about) and show the correct name and file sizes, but not a single one will actually open. This situation seemed like the perfect scenario for this app to work flawlessly and it failed miserably.

I've been a Macintosh user since the very first year the Mac was released, and in that time I have maintained a current inventory of virtually every major Mac utility software. Fast forward to today, and I am currently involved in a major time lapse photography project operating up to 5 cameras simultaneously on a construction project. This generates thousands of photos every single day and takes hours every night to download, backup, and reformat the cards to be ready for an early start the next morning. This entire process is incredibly labor intensive, and a break in coverage can threaten the entire project if a major gap were to occur. That's the situation I found myself in tonight when a 128 GB memory card would not mount on the Mac desktop, and could not be read on the camera that had created the photos. While I don't have extensive experience with this software yet, I have decades of experience with similar recovery utilities, and they are always a last resort and nearly always fail. In this case, I started the morning with a cleanly formatted SD card and wrote a single file type, Canon CR2, to the card. Data Recovery Essential performed so well, and recovered all my photos off this card so fast, I get to sleep tonight and nothing was lost from a very important camera angle on the time lapse today. Thank you!

Inadvertently, I permanently erased some important work data. I spent several hours trying to salvage them and tried many apps. Data Recovery Essential was the only one that did not ask for a steep price to recover just 10Mb, and data were recovered perfectly.
Data Recovery Essential allows to recover 100Mb of data per day for free (you pay if you need to retrieve more), and also through its website provides an additional script to avoid the hassle of generating a disk image. Everything worked great in my hands, and also appreciated the transparency of the developers, as the limit of data retrievable for free was very clear upfront.