Stellar Data Recovery

10.0.0.0

10.0.0.0

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Of the data recovery programs I tried, Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery was the only one that actually showed the original file name in the preview window. That's important.

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After reading the other reviews, I found myself in a similar situation... Last Wednesday one of my hard drive in my HP Mediasmart was refusing access to its content. I took the hard drive and put it in my macpro. I downloaded the demo 5.0 and run it overnight. The following morning when I woke up it says that it was able to find files. So I ordered the software. I received an email immediately after my online purchase...Except they sent me an email with a serial for the version 4.1. Which didn't work! I decided to call as their website says 24 hours from Monday to Friday. An answering message said that it was closed for holidays! At this point I wondered if the company was legit, or some scam company like Mackeeper. Afraid to lose all my precious family photos, I tried another software (NFTS -3G) which basically mounted the hard drive on my desktop, and immediately I could see all my files. The next Friday I received an apology email from the company with a new serial number. I looked online and found their 30-days policy. I thought I would be able to get a refund since I wasn't able to use their software and the correct serial. On Friday I was able to call a customer service which told me to simply email and ask for a RMA #. I have sent several emails and I had to wait 4 days for an answer. Their answer was telling me that they would easily refund me, but before that I will need to talk to their customer service. After another call, they said to email... which I explained I already did. I could see myself in a loop between emails and phone calls. I end up calling my bank to escalate this as a fraud. With the supervisor of the bank and me over the phone, we spoke for over 50 minutes... They basically won't listen and refuse and send me to a loop. They basically will not assume their 30-days policy. So now the claim is escalating within my bank. In short... their customer service is awful. They don't honor their 30-days return policy, and keep playing with email and phone calls. Here is a copy of their email: "I would like to inform you that refund is not an issue for us, our prime motive is to help you in any way.So I request you to kindly co-operate with us and take our technical support assistance. If they could not resolve your issue in that case I will refund the full amount. Software is not meant for only one time recovery, it carries a lifetime license which would certainly help you in future along with that we provide unlimited technical support to all our valued customers. Hoping for your kind co-operation. Thanks, Vinita Chauhan Stellar Information Systems Limited" In the end, I can't believe their practice. They failed to provide a service for such an emergency situation. I couldn't use their software and serial number. I didn't want to lose my honeymoon, wedding, son birth pictures. :( So yes I am spending over 25 minutes to write a negative review, because they manage to not only disappoint me but to upset me too. THis is not the way to do business, Stellar Phoenix. As for my future backups, I decided to buy a Synology NAS with Raid 5, and I will add an online backup as well, I learn my lesson.

Bought and used this software (vers 4.0) to recover a drive in 2009- worked fine- then they updated it to vers 4.1 this year and my former version (4.0) will NO LONGER accept my serial number! I don't need the upgrade so why is the older version no longer working??? So then I tried to upgrade- no response from the seller- in retrospect I wished I had gone with a different software package from the get go in 2009. (PS We need a new category called Tech Support so I could give them zero stars...)

WARNING!!! READ BEFORE YOU BUY!!! We paid an inflated fee of $99 for this software (of course the Windows version costs much less than the Mac version) to recover a single folder, that contained hundreds of enclosed folders and maybe 15,000 Microsoft files. The software recovered about 10,000 Microsoft files, along with tens of thousands of useless "other" files. The main problem is that this software puts a numerical label on each file, it cannot recover folders or enclosing folders, and the creation dates for each file is not recovered. We are left with 10,000 files that must be opened one at a time. If you trash a file, you must EACH TIME enter your system password when taking it to the trash can. With most files, when you close them, you are prompted to do a change save, regardless of what you do (or do not do) to the file. All of this takes valuable time. We have calculated that it will take many months to restore these files. Given that only 5% of these files have any real value to our business, we estimate the real cost per file saved to be about $1. This means the complete restoration of this file, assuming it is all there (who knows?) might be as high as $10,000. That is a lot of money to get back some deleted software. Also, do not be fooled by the 30 day money back guarantee. These bozos are not giving your money back no matter what you say. Once you pay for the license, your money is gone. Forget about a refund. Did we get some files restored? Yes, many. Can we now afford to go through each file to determine its value? No, we cannot. The restored files as basically useless. This application takes a pile of garbage and turns it into a sorted pile of garbage. If that is what you need, spend your $99. If you need an efficient application that gets you back on track, look elsewhere.

This Comment is in response to KENNYBAKER's most recent comment. I am glad that you have added the ability to recover Sparse Bundle files up to 4KB. However, I hope that is a typo, as I can't imagine a Sparse Bundle that small being remotely useful. So, I'm hoping you really meant MB, GB or TB. Given that a TimeCapsule uses Sparse Bundles, such support could be useful if the limit were 4TB or larger. The other issue, is just who is KENNYBAKER? Your Aug 11, response makes it look very much like you may work for or are affiliated with Stellar Phoenix. However, by clicking on your user name, I see that there is a review from someone using the same account and giving the product 5 stars. MacUpdate has a policy that discourages developers from reviewing their own, or their competitors products. The quote is as follows, "Note: Developers, please don't unethically post star rating reviews to your own products or you will be added to a public Developer Blacklist." I suggest that you turn yourself in. Apologize, ask for mercy, request that they pull the prior review, and agree not to do it again. Frankly, I do think highly of your product as I hope my review reflects. While it certainly doesn't work all of the time, when it does work, it is pretty amazing. With continued development, you will have a very useful product there. It was already good enough that I spent my hard earned $$$ to buy it. And if you do still want me to look at the new product after this posting, I will be happy to do so.

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 tried the latest release and its pretty darn stable under Mac OS X 10.5.4. Tried it with a few hard drives and was able to see lots of things I thought were long gone. Give it another try now- whatever the changes were they added to the stability. Still an 'ugly' app though.

Use this at your own risk to your sanity and well being. Crashes continually, normally after you have wasted 6 hours of your time and /or reaches around 3.774gb of data you can not save your initial scans so you have to go through the procedure of re-scanning your drive for another 3 hours. Did not find a single file that was able to be restored. Mac Data Rescue II took 6 hours of deep scanning found every file of the lost 131gb i had lost Stellar 000gb. More important the tech support asks you to fill in endless forms to help them help you, which in 13 days of dealing with over the phone too India they did not offer a single bit of help. AND THEY DO NOT HONOR THIER 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. Do not use this product Use DATA MAC RESCUE II you'll thank me for it.