I purchased this to recover some MXF files on a drive. I twice tried to scan the drive (a 2TB) drive, and it failed by crashing both times at about the 80% point. After the second crash, I contacted their support, which just gave me the run around. Finally after about three days, I bought their competitor, and it worked fine. Scanned the drive no problem. I asked Stellar for my money back, which they refused to do saying that 'only by finding a bug would they refund my money."

Bottom line, this product does not work as advertised, their tech support is a joke, they will not refund money when the product does not work as advertised, and I would warn anyone away from buying this product. In short, these folks appear to be rip offs. Being in India I assume they are outside of any laws to recover funds in Europe or North America. Go try the competition.

$99 ??!!Is it worth so much money? There are so many similar software with the same functions,such as Nice to Recover Data for Mac ,which is more compact(2.5 M) and much cheaper($69.95 )!
http://www.92recover.com

I urgently had to recover files from a formatted external disk, so I tried the demos of Data Rescue 3 and Stellar's Data Recovery 4. I bought Data Recovery, because it was a bit cheaper than Data Rescue. To make a long story short: RegNow/Stellar sent a license code that did not work. It lasted 3 days until Stellar sent version 3 (!) with a license code. Strange, because I bought vs.4... Two days later I recieved a new vs.4 with a new license code. I didn't try it, because in the meantime I had recovered the missed files with Data Rescue. Data Recovery was totally useless for me now, so I asked for a refund. Refunding the money lasted 5 days (and 5 emails). Best of all: RegNow asked Stellar to allow the refund, in response Stellar sent an email to ME, asking me to send my request to RegNow. This procedure was repeated 3 times before RegNow refunded the money! By the way: Data Recovery (demo) was not able to find (hundreds of) orphaned files Data Rescue found. My recommendation: Try Data Rescue, it's the better choice.

I indicated in my prior post, that I would provide an update for the benefit of others.

After working with them for a few days, tech support turned out to be a mixed bag. I think they tried to help me, but nothing they suggested actually resolved the problem. However, I was able to solve the problem on my own.

There were three sparse bundle disk images, created by disk utility, that contained important files that had not yet been backed up. There were also four additional sparse bundle disk images that had been backed up. While all seven of these appeared to have been restored, none of them would open.

From my observations of working sparse bundle disk images, a normal sparse bundle disk image is really a folder, not a file. (you can peak inside by right-clicking, or control clicking on it.) Inside of it is another folder named "bands" which contains the files that get combined to make the actual disk image, when you open this. Remember when modems were slow, and we segmented disk images? Well think of the band files as something like disk image segments.

There is also a zero-size file named token, which aside from the obvious suggestions of it's name, I have no idea how it is used. And there is an Info.plist and an Info.bckup. In all of the examples that I looked at Info.bckup and info.plist were identical. It appears that the information in this file is important enough that Apple wanted there to be a backup.

In all of the seven sparse bundle disk images restored by Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery, the tolken, info.plist and info.bckup files were missing. I created a new sparse bundle disk image having the same characteristics, and I copied the files that were missing into the recovered sparse bundle disk images. After doing that, they would open. I'm not sure that it was necessary, but to feel extra good, I repaired them. (with Disk Utility and Disk Warrior)

Since the info.plist file contains information about the maximum size, and band-size, I'm not sure if just any would have worked. But I had created all of them the same way and remembered so I could create an empty one having the same properties.

At this point, my assumption was that Stellar Phoenix Data recovery simply filtered out plists and files of zero length. After all, it had successfully recovered many gigabytes of other files. And they had the right names, and were in the right folders.

In an effort to test that theory, I took an external firewire drive, zeroed it and made a small partition. I then put data on it, including some sparse bundle disk images. Lastly, I used disk utility to do a simple erase.

However, this time Stellar Phoenix recovered almost nothing. And I have not a clue why.

So, my take is that sometimes this program will do an amazing job of recovery. It will recover files with the right names and in the right folders which is far superior to what most other utilities will do. But in other cases, you may hit a dry well.

If Stellar can improve the consistency of success, and make a few things clearer, they may have a winner. I'd say it is still worth giving it a try though, as the other recovery products tend to give you a set of generic folders with files named picture1.jpg, picture2.jpg…etc. having lost all of the original meta data.

I will echo several comments here about Stellar Phoenix hanging. I purchased it to recover photos from a second internal drive in my Mac PowerPC G5 running OS 10.4.11. I attempted to recover three times, each time booting from the program disc on the Mac.

Especially considering the cost, I am disappointed. From the posts here, it sounds as though tech support is useless. I purchased it based on reviews and the recommendations from Mac magazines. I hope the company can make some changes that will permit this software to work at some point. Until then, it is a good reminder to me to be careful about what I choose to purchase. Happily, this is one of the less than a handful of bad Mac programs I've had since 1989.

In conclusion, I cannot say it better than another person who shared their experience here: purchase at your own risk!