Stellar Data Recovery for Mac

11.0.0.0

11.0.0.0

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Recently I experienced a data loss of 650GB of data directly attributed to a lack of transparency of the limitations of SoftRAID software in their FAQ section on their website. This included around 30 years of important data, photos in Photo Library and information contained in DevonThink databases. So, I have been attempting recovery using this product and other data recovery apps. As it turns out, all that I have tried including Stellar Premium are not able to search for file types that are call bundles which Photo and DevonThink files are. What a bundle is a data container that contains the individual files in their saved format. What this means for recovery is that this recovery tool, like all I have tested, can only recover the files in these data containers or bundles but NOT the bundle with the files in them. For the user this means recreating the bundles from the raw data that was recovered, often with only a generic filename when recovered. For significant amounts of data or photos this can literally take many months. In the case of Stellar, having read some reviews of some success in this endeavor I attempted to do a search using this tool. Like its competitors it could not display any found bundles for recovery. What made this even more frustrating is that when contacting Tech Support and even doing screen sharing, they refused to acknowledge this limitation when directly asked, only suggesting I redo the search with the hope they might show up. Since a deep search on an 8TB drive can literally take days, they were perfectly willing to waste my time rather than admit the limitations of their product. So, my advice be for wasting your time looking for recovery of unsupported file types is first checking the list on their website for support file types. If you desired file type is not listed and there are no tools capable of adding the desired file extension, as in the case with Stellar Data Recovery, consider it may not be with your time and energy to do the demo scan to find your desired files. Also realizing if you do you may be only able to recover the actual files with generic files names that made up you Photos Library or database in the case of bundles that you may have to make a time commitment of many months to organize the recovered files back to their original format in their bundles. In the case of files with uncommon extensions, you may simply not be able to recover them at all unless they happen to show up or you can add their extension to the search tool in the program.

love it

Love This Add-On, my external drive has bad sectors, Stellar Data Recovery software makes the disk image and I safely retrieve the 40GB data in original condition. It is a life-saving & Easy to use product. P.S. Using on macOS Catalina without a glitch.

Though EaseUS is free, I will recommend trying Stellar for better data recovery because unlike EaseUS, Stellar was able to complete the scan on my corrupt 64GB flash storage drive and recovered around 90% of my files.

I upgraded to High Sierra sometime back, but had to downgrade to Sierra. Eventually, I ended up with loosing the data after downgrading Mac. I came across Stellar Mac Data Recovery software and it recovered the lost files. It did with ease.

The recent version of Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery is impressive. I purchased this software to recover data from my hard drive (which I formatted by mistake). The demo version showed all my files which I wanted badly. It took time while scanning the drive but satisfied with the results as the software completed the task of recovering files.​​

Its very useful and I like it.

Stellar Phoenix recovered latest backup from my troubled 1TB Toshiba Time Machine hard drive. Perhaps this is the only software that recovers files from the Time Machine drive systematically. Are there others tool that can recover Time Machine?

Not only did this software not work but the support team at Stellar wanted to argue with me about it and refused to refund me. Do not download this software. Data Rescue 4 worked for me

A comparison site recommended a different product, which I bought. It crashed twice, after 4 hours each time. Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery ran perfectly, recovering 149GB of missing data.

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.

Your Data Recovery program worked like a charm on my Mac. It was worth every dollar!!!

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.

I have been long waiting for some software that can retrieve files from my couple of damned flash drives. These drives didn’t mount on my Mac. Though I downloaded Stellar Phoenix software I preferred to image my drives rather than launching straight forward scan. One by one both of them were Imaged, I got to say, time taken for imaging each drive was more than what I expected. Nonetheless, the scan begin to process and files got arranged in some hierarchy. This happened with my both flash drives and I successfully extracted files from it. Upon examining recovered files I found most of them in stable conditions, though few jpg and Adobe CS files couldn’t be launched. Overall, I am pretty happy with how things worked for me.

I tried Stellar Phoenix and Disk Drill to recover files on my Mac Mini hard drive. During the run, I found Stellar Phoenix as more robust and quick. It scanned 500 GB drive and recovered deleted video files. All of them are running good in QT player. Though, Stellar Phoenix is slightly ($10) costly than the Disk Drill home version. I am happy it worked for me.

It helped me in recovering the lost Mac files and third party applications which was hard for me to recollect from my corrupted hard drive and saved me from a big trouble.

Trying to resize Mac partition but unfortunately formatted my Mac HDD and lost my data. Got my data back upto 2 TB easily with this software.

Yesterday week, I was trying to create a new partition, but formatted my Mac drive volume accidentally and was seeking the solution for getting my important data back but all in vain. After lot more had work, I came to know about Stellar Phoenix Mac data Recovery software. Earlier I was worried about using this software first time but all done very well with in few clicks. I got my memorable pics and important files back again. Thanks

Absolutely awful. I'd originally run ProSoft's Data Rescue 3 to rescue a volume on which a few hundred thousand photos and videos had inexplicably simply disappeared; after (perhaps unrealistically) being disappointed at how disorganized the recovery was, I bought SP Mac Data Recovery under the misapprehension that it did a better job recovering original file names. That much was my mistake. The utility ran for literally a couple of MONTHS, 24/7, to recover data. And when it was done, the JPEG recovery was somewhat worse than DR 3 and with no better file name info, but the video recovery... not a single video was playable. NOT ONE. I re-ran Data Rescue 3, limiting it to video recovery; it ran for a much, much shorter period and it seems that at least 90% of the videos are in excellent shape, with another 5% or more at least mostly playable. I contacted Stellar Phoenix, but they were no help at all; it was like calling Three Stooges Tech Support Co.

This software does not work as represented. The filter and search tabs do not work. When you demand a refund the company refuses. Save your time and money and use the Seagate recovery software that actually does work.

Recupera bene, ma si comporta meglio con winzozz che con mac. E' un po' instabile. Una volta mi si è bloccata in mezzo, tuttavia è la migliore per mac che recupera in fat 32. Poi con HFS c'è una bella lotta con disk drill e data rescue. I risultati sono maggiori con stellar phoenix.

So far the best to recover, in my case, from a formatted HFS+ (MAC) disk. Failed in big .psb files, not all of them, and some .psd. At least you have the original directories and names of the files, not as other apps that you just get a list of files with name sequences, and if you are recovering a 1TB disk formatted, having such list of files that have no names or original directories location is a mess!! Some bugs as if you continue working and left behind the program when you are recovering the files and bring on front, the process windows became blank and you do not know if still recovering but you still have the option to stop it by locating the pointer on the red button area but blank window will remain till you close the app, being on top. Another slow recovery process is that when the app finds that a file is unrecoverable then stops the copy and you have to start again from that point instead of create a folder within the directory containing those files. Sorry, not easy to explain but over all THE BEST!!!

The catalog btree on one of my HFS fileystems got wrecked, resulting in a unrecoverable situation by normal means. As I had very important files on that filesystem (a few years worth of photos) I desperately tried both DiskWarrior, Data Rescue and Techtool among a few. None of them could get me back my files. Enter Mac Data Recovery. Never heard about it, found some mentions after searching the fsck output on google. Saw the poor reviews on MU but decided to give it a go anyways. Boy am I happy I did! This program presented me with a list of the files with original filenames and let me restore them quickly! The deep recovery option was impressively fast. I never had to contact support, so I can't really comment on that. However, I think it's unfair to rate the program half a star when you didn't even try it like the guy below. Customer support isn't one of the criteria, it would be better to write as a comment, no?

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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.

Tried a bunch of other apps along with this one (all in Demo mode) but this one got the most files off a FAT32 LaCie drive that failed, so I bought it. Had to be careful to navigate all the cryptically named folders in the results window to be sure I was recovering what I needed and not useless dreck. Pricey? Maybe a bit, but $99 to get 3 years worth of photos back without having to load dozens of DVD backups was worth it.

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.

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...)

$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

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've had much better success with this than some are reporting. My version was 4.0.1.0. The partition had been erased by accident. The machine was running Snow Leopard. A couple of other utilities were tried first. They were able to recover files by type, but without their name or file hierarchy. So it would be a bit of a mess to sort through. I tried the trial. It appeared to find everything with their names in their original file hierarchy. So I paid the money and did the restore. So far everything that I have tried has opened fine, with one exception. I had a couple of sparcebundle disk images there. They appeared to be recovered fine. But would not open. A right click even shows me the contents with the bands, etc. It appears nicely restored, but obviously something is missing. All in all, it was still impressed. But, the bad news is that these sparcebundles contained the only important thing that wasn't otherwise backed up. I've dropped an email to Stellar. I will report about their responsiveness.

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!

Epic fail. After letting the scanner run overnight and saving the scan results, there is no way I can find to reload those results after I've quit the application. What a joke. This looks like a very poorly written and buggy piece of Mac software. I'm now trying Data Rescue, which looks much better.

I just used Stellar Phoenix to retrieve 1.8 GB of pictures and movies from a (virus) corrupted memory card that Mac OS X wasn't even capable to mount. It just worked perfectly : every single media file was identified and recovered perfectly. It's just impressive, since all the others programs I tried weren't capable of recovering anything, or just a few pictures. Try it, it's worth it.

This product is darn ugly. It works ok, but I prefer other products that do a better job.

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.

My 500 GB disk with about 450GB of video just dissappeared, and I chose this application to help me out. Diskwarrior does not work under 10.5, but Stellar Phoenix does. And you can download and activate it online . After 10 minutes with the demo version I bought the full version. The GUI is a bit different from most mac apps, but the application itself performed miracles. The disk that Apples Disk Tool gave up on has been saved, and for a reasonable price as well. The version is 2.1, on Mac OS 10.5 / intel. A very good solution for those of us that think backup is for other people..

Apparently this software does not work with 10.4. I launched the program and told it to do a quickscan of a disk. That was the last thing it did, until I forced quit on it, 5 minutes later.

Crashes upon launch. Unable to evaluate. (Mac OS X 10.4.9, Powermac PPC dual 2.5 Ghz, 1.5 GB RAM, repaired permissions, etc.)

It is not entirely fair to call this a review, since I have not tried the sharp/paid version, only the demo. But I would still like to comment on how very promising I found the demo compared to any program I have tried before, in that it did seem to accurately locate drives and their hierarchical contents, otherwise almost entirely lost to the world. Partition maps were correctly identified as well, when even the second most promising utility out there did only locate the first of three partitions. The huge drawback with this demo is, in my opinion, that it does only allow one to view its (impressive, admittedly) way of locating everything (at least as far as I recall it), i.e. no actual recovery permitted. This is unfortunate since it has happened to me before that apparent files actually points at entirely different contents on damaged drives. So, dare I pay for the licence at the risk of ending up with software able to recover, say, an apparent image file in fact pointing as some (part of) a sound file or something else...? Being desperate (and welthy) enough, I just might... I would easily give it the highest rating had I the chance to ascertain its ability to actually recover files as well as it locates their (again, apparent!) whereabouts. Giving it five stars for its locating wizardry seems inappropriate, at least given my questioning as to the restriction of the demo. A demo allowing for at least a certain amount of recovery would be fair, it would seem.