Others say...

"Did what it promised it would - how suprising!"
This software did exactly what the literature said it would. The supporting .pdf user's manual was a bit vague in two instances, however quick calls to knowledgeable tech support staff got me going.

Would recommend this product, without hesitation.

This is the kind of resource that public libraries should have in their lending collection.

Hopefully, this is a once in a lifetime need and I have fulfilled my lifetime demand!

"Recovering data and peace of mind"
I was frantic when I discovered that I had thrown away 20 years worth of accumulated sermons, letters, articles I'd written, even book manuscripts. (Yes, I know I should have backed up! But I hadn't.) I bought this product, and recovered everything. Simple and elegant. It doesn't take a technician to do it. You can also get it on to a start-up CD, which I would think most users would want to do. My only negative is that my e-mails to ProSoft for promised free technical assistance were cryptic and only marginally helpful. But as it turned out, the software was so easy to use that it didn't matter.

Several things you should know, however:

* The moment you realize you've lost data, you must shut down your computer and restart from the CD or a different drive. Even if you're not actively saving files, applications are constantly writing to the drive in the background, and could overwrite something you've thrown away, making it unrecoverable.

* You must have an external firewire or USB drive. It is not sufficient to be connected to a network--DRII will not work over a network. I was able to borrow a small FW drive, and it worked fine.

* You will not get back your file names. You will, however, get back file types. So you'll know it's a MS word file, but not which MS word file. Which necessitates opening each file and renaming it. This is the tax (along with the roughly $100 to buy the software, plus all your worry) on your stupidity in throwing away your files in the first place. (Note: I think someone could create a utility to streamline that process.)

* You will get back junk you never knew was on there, and that you didn't put there, such as hundreds of foreign language templates and legal disclaimers that Office apparently dumps on to your drive when it first installs, and then erases. (One wonders why it is necessary for Office to do that.)

* Finally, if you're using 10.4 and you want to search those unnamed files by content using the powerful Spotllight search engine, you will have to get Spotlight to index the new files. For some reason, that doesn't happen automatically when you place those recovered files back on your disk from a FW drive. Go to the Spotlight preferences panel, click on the privacy tab, and drag the folders with the recovered data into the privacy panel. Close the preferences window, reopen it, and erase them from that privacy listing. As they come back into the main set of files again, Spotlight will automatically index them. Though this happens in the background, it takes a few minutes and slows things down (a small price to pay.)

It is cheaper right now to buy DRII on Amazon than on the ProSoft website. If you do buy it at ProSoft, don't bother to get the CD package mailed to you if you have a fast connection. Download it, make your own CD, and save $10.

"Grate product A++++++++ !!!!!!!!!Saved the day!!!!!!!!!"
I had a drive that would not mount and thought my data was lost forever. But then I found this software that saved the day. Data Rescue II was able to recover all of my music, programs, photos and videos that where on the drive. I also was abal to recover songs and other files that where accidently deleted from the past. My drive is now better then it was before I had the problems.

This software is diffrent becuse it foces the rescue of the data and not the repare of the drive. You may do more damage to your drive and your data if your try to repare your drive

"Did the job!"
I'm very impressed with this product. After buying DiskWarrior (which did not work) I downloaded the free trial of Data Rescue and was pleasantly surprised. In about 7 hours it read my severely damaged hard drive and saved thousands of my files. Well worth the price, particularly since it's risk free to buy the trial version.

"Saves Your Data!"
I can't say enough about how grateful I am for this software. It was able to recover in a few hours what DiskWarrior could not find over several days of scanning. Get the free demo, run a scan to be sure it works, then you can buy the full version to recover all your files. This will save you from wasting money on products that might not work.