FileSalvage

Crap that barely works. And what's with the retarded new version numbering systems? Monkeys.

Almost certainly, your best defense against accidentally deleted files will be the judicious use of Time Machine. However, if a file somehow evades your attempts at retrieval, there's still a chance that FileSalvage may not come up with the results you seek. Moreover, the file will come up with a generic name, which means you'd have to find it first. And doing a Salvage can take the better part of a day. In other words, aggressive backup is your best strategy - rather than picking up the pieces with a software solution. Also, beware that you'll need an external hard drive to save the results.

i have trouble recovering dada or even mount the LaCie hard drive on to my computer, need to recover all data , any suggestions? Lacie is a external Hard drive, thanks

Downloaded to try out, but upon launching it, it asked to install files on my HD. No indication of what it wanted to install where. I couldn't find any clues in the manual, either. I'll pass on this one until I can find out what it wants to do to my system.

I just downloaded the demo of version 6.1.5, and I'm not impressed that the 'trial' usage doesn't give me any way of assessing whether this app can do what it promises, even for a day.... Sorry, you're not getting my money this way.

I needed to undelete files I had stupidly put in the trash and then emptied. File Salvage worked great, and the customer service responded via email within just a couple of hours when I had a question. The interface was user friendly, and I got my files back. No complaints. Worth the $$$

Up until today I would have praised this tool as being very good and useful in a pinch. Version 6.1 has a very dumb bug, you cannot install it properly or even us it if your OSX account has no password like mine. Very very silly, how many home users waste time with a password? Losing 1 star for this one!

Tried the demo of this software on an external drive where I'd deleted some pictures I wanted to recover. It churned on the drive for many hours (looking only for jpg and raw files) and then this morning said it was done. Went to save the search results, and the program produced a spinning beach ball which I let spin for about 1.5 hours before giving up. Not impressed; poorly designed user interface, confusing to use, and didn't work for me. YMMV.

Unfortunately I shelled out the $79 for File Salvage, having read some positive reviews elsewhere. I wasted 3 days trying to get it to 'salvage' 180gb of data from a hard drive which would not mount. Mostly video files, of the type it says it will retrieve for you. The software crashed so many times, hanging part way through it's 'magic'!$%#@! Thus, 3 days later, and I had several partial retrieves of up to about 70 gb of data, mostly unreadable, unrecognisable, and having lost any names or folders that rendered it largely useless. Only around 20gb of the data retrieved would even open in any format. Most fo the drive contents were a mystery to me still. Then I was recommended Data Rescue, and downloaded a demo, which took all of 5 minutes to show me every single file on the drive, with correct names and folder structure! Sadly the money does not stretch far enough to spend another $100, but I so wish I had purchased Data Rescue instead of this tragedy. At least now I know what I gave lost. I implore you: check out your other options. I am a Mac User of 20 years, and have no connection with either software I have mentioned. (yes, i know I should have backed up the drive, but I do non-profit video production for non-profit organisation, so the budget isn't there for that many hard drives to back up video projects being worked on. I use tape backups)

This product is absolutely fantastic! One of our designers deleted a major project yesterday. I was away at a conference and my daily Retrospect Server tape had run out six days ago. No one had put in a new tape. I had never lost anything on my network in 13 years. FileSalvage SAVED THE DAY and my record of never loosing anything. It worked like a charm. This is a MUST buy if your bacon is on the line.

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Having seen negative reviews here I felt I was taking a gamble, but File Salvage worked superbly for me, recovering important MS Word documents I had created ten months before and somehow trashed from my iBook. I guess it won't always work and when it doesn't you may well feel like posting a negative review, but it worked for me and was well worth the price to avoid having to do the work all over again.

This program just saved my butt. I lost an entire photoshoot (CR2 RAW files) due to a bad mv command in bash (don't ask). FileSalvage recovered everything. The volume recovered from was a RAID 1 drive array of two 500GB SATA disks formatted with HFS+. Proving once again, RAID is no guard against user stupidity.

This can recover files from reformatted disks, but the rename feature is worthless. After recovering the files (named as 1,2,3, etc), it is supposed to dig into the file to determine the original name and reset it to the original. The software just stops working, forcing you to either force it to quit (which often doesn't work) or force the computer to restart. Renaming bogs down at File 1. This is very expensive software for what you're getting. I was able to recover files using cheap PC shareware (on a Mac formatted disk) that did the exact same thing. If this worked as advertised, it would be wonderful. FileSalvage, unfortunately, is mostly snake oil.

MacUpdate doesn't yet list the changes that come with version 5, so here they are (gleaned from MacMinute): a new and streamlined interface, support for Intel-based Macs, an auto file renaming feature, and a new bootable DVD. I own the previous version of this software. Unfortunately it has not helped me recover a single file successfully; it could just be my bad luck. All I've ever gotten is gibberish, even when possibly hundreds of files were mistakenly deleted all at once. (They couldn't have all been overwritten, could they?)

useless for fixed media (hard drives). Will find NO files to recover. Works for FAT32 (flash drives) only. There is freeware to work with FAT32 drives. Do not be fooled by positive reivew elsewhere on the web- the negative comments here are the correct ones.

Worthless. Don't be fooled, these types of programs appear to reveal files for you. Then you pay the money and you get gibberish. I reformatted 140gigs of info and got back 72gigs of gibberish. Software jumbled, MP3's with no name or artist, no iMovie files, no Word docs would open, just a bunch of junk. It just reminds you how much you really lost. Don't send the money, it isn't worth it. Veteran Mac user (12 years)

This program saved my thesis outline, and several freelance projects I'd been working on that I accidentally deleted two nights before. Yes, I do back-ups, but my last known back-up was 3 weeks ago. Enter FileSalvage. This program works as advertised. It was able to retrieve over 80% of my data, intact. As for the price - how much is your data really worth? I think $80 is a fair price - it's about $10 more than DiskWarrior, and in my opinion, FileSalvage is just as important to have around as DW.

FileSalvage is well worth the $80 I spent on it. None of the other solutions could see near the amount of data that FileSalvage was able to recover. The process was simple from registration all the way to recovery and I got back some very important files from my USB flash drive. Read my detailed review on my site. http://www.jamiephelps.com/cogentprose/archives/2005/08/filesalvage-is-worth-the-price/

Whether this is overpriced or not (I do agree its expensive and don't like that there is no demo - so perhaps there is an element of opportunistic gouging) the final question when you lay out your hard earned pesos is "How much is my data worth?" Inattention has its price. I was glad to have my data back in spite of the high $$$, but they might get more buyers if they lowered the entry fee. Peter