Data Rescue 6 review

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially where data recovery is concerned. For long-time fans of Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue software, which currently stands at version 6.0.8 as of this writing, the developers have added some excellent drive management and data recovery features, albeit at a steep price for occasional users.

Like its previous versions, Data Rescue 6 is easy to download from Prosoft’s website, and once you’ve assigned full drive access to the application, you’re ready to go. The software can be used on a trial basis and can scan a hard drive and recover up to 1GB of data for free. Anything beyond this, and things begin to add up, the company charging a $19 fee per individual, non-licensed data retrieval, $79/£74.32 for a standard license that offers unlimited data recovery for up to 30 days, and a professional license for $399/£375.34 a year that offers unlimited recovery for a single year. This is only the beginning, as the hefty fee covers only one Mac or Windows PC, and the auto-renew option will have to be turned off from within your Web-based Prosoft account, lest your credit or debit card gets dinged somewhere down the line. The high price may well pale into insignificance depending on the value of the data you are trying to recover, of course.

Like previous versions of Data Rescue, once you’ve accepted the price, there’s a compelling toolset to work with. It’s easy enough to perform a Quick Scan or a Deep Scan, view hex tables, perform a secure erase, set drive parameters, manage a virtual RAID setup, and work with numbered sectors on drives as well as allocation blocks, and the software’s scan Scan Management allows you to work with up to 15 scans, pausing and resuming them as needed, which comes in handy if you’ve already invested several hours into a Deep Scan. Drop a hard drive into an external carrier, mount it in Data Rescue 6, and it’s easy to start scanning the drive, assign a recovery folder, and begin pulling data as well as reconstructing data as needed.

Granted, there are limitations, and if the drive is mechanically failing, it’ll be that much harder for data to be pulled and reconstructed, but the software launches into its task, runs well in the background, and pulls no punches when it comes to harvesting and rebuilding everything it can.

One of the best elements of recent versions of Data Rescue has been its ability to create clone and recovery drives, and Data Rescue 6 does this well, albeit with a few caveats. Cloning from one drive to another proved rock solid, complete with different data strategies (such as Straight, Reverse, Bisect, and Segment), and the software handled this well. Creating a recovery drive from either a volume partition or macOS install file was simple, but Data Rescue 6.0.8 doesn’t currently offer an option with which to create a macOS Sonoma recovery drive, which was worrying given that this version of the operating system has been out for ten months at the time of this review.

Where Data Rescue 6’s more technical tools come into play, there’s plenty to work with, along with the potential to get yourself in trouble if you’re not sure what you’re doing. Setting the wrong drive parameters or boot point can lead to having to troubleshoot this, and while it’s nice that the tools are there, you might want to read up on them before using them.

While there are some excellent tools to be found within Data Rescue 6 and it’s become part of my bread and butter for recovering data for tech clients, there are some elements that Prosoft needs to address. Attempts to reach the company for support and technical questions went nowhere, the current lack of an option to create a macOS Sonoma recovery drive raises one’s eyebrows, and the fact that the last time the software was updated was in 2023 is worrying. Yes, the company has other applications to support and sell, but it’s also asking a considerable price from its users, who in turn are using it for the extremely critical function of trying to get their data back before the drives they’re working on mechanically fail to the point that data can’t be recovered from them.

Data Rescue 6 supports older versions of macOS and only requires macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later to install and run, but when it’s been more than six months since its last update, it feels as if Prosoft’s attention has wandered elsewhere.

Verdict

There’s an excellent set of tools here that I generally swear by, but a lack of attention and customer responsiveness can strain the relationship between any software company and even its most loyal customers. This, combined with a hefty subscription-based price tag that occasional/intermittent users might not be prepared for, and a lack of a good tutorial system have Prosoft shooting itself in the foot when it doesn’t need to. These aren’t epic fixes that need to be performed and there’s no need to go back to formula, but there are times when a company needs to offer better support, if only to be in a better position to offer a great product that can genuinely help those who need it.

Find out how Data Rescue compares to the other data recovery apps for Mac in our round-up.