At a glance

Our Verdict

Data Rescue is a strong and reliable hard-drive recovery solution for your Mac. The application allows you to recover lost or deleted files, mount corrupted drives, and more. Data Rescue gives you peace of mind from any hard-drive disaster you may come accross. Data Rescue Pro non-destructive professional data recovery software applicable to windows operating system. It helps you to save missing files in PC hard disk, removable storage media (SD card, USB driver, digital camera, mobile phone, ipod, MP3 MP4 player, external hard disk drive)caused by delete, formating, re-partition and merger partition.

For years, Prosoft Engineering has made a great product with its Data Rescue line. The application promises to let you mount and work with the hard drives that ordinarily couldn’t be mounted. It can ignore any and all slow read warnings that might pop up, and although it might take hours, days, or even weeks, Data Rescue could recover your data, dredge up deleted files, and clone hard drive partitions to more functional devices.

This tradition lives on in Data Rescue 4, which isn’t a revolutionary change from Data Rescue 3, but throws in interesting and useful new features such as the ability to recover data from NTFS-formatted partitions (i.e., Boot Camp) and the ability to create a BootWell partition to boot your Mac from in order to run Data Rescue 4. It’s the BootWell function that might just sell you on the new version.

Data Rescue 4 Download

Data Rescue 4 Apfs

Open Data Rescue 4’s minimal packaging and you’ll find your serial number, a pamphlet advertising the company’s professional-grade Data Rescue Center, and a fire engine red 16GB USB flash drive containing the application. Plug the flash drive into your Mac, and while the initial one-time opening animation is a bit overdone and annoying, it’s easy enough to install and start working with the app as well as make a BootWell drive to boot from.

Data Rescue 4 still does a terrific job of data recovery. Like its preceding versions, you can set the program to ignore slow hard drive warnings and methodically pull all possible data from the hard drive, no matter how long it takes. Deleted file recovery and cloning work like a charm, and NTFS data recovery was able to pull data off my Boot Camp partition without issue. For longer recovery cycles, most processes can be suspended and resumed later, allowing you to take the recovery on the road if need be.

While Data Rescue 3 was generally stable, there were times where I felt it was best to keep the processor load light and not run too many programs alongside my data recovery effort. In contrast, Data Rescue 4 feels stable enough to run just about anything alongside it, and it was nice to get side work done while my 2013 Mac Pro recovered both found and reconstructed files from the drive it was working on. I couldn’t make Data Rescue 4 crash, and the only time it felt slow was in resuming functionality after the computer was woken up from sleep.

If there are any complaints to register, it’s the fact that you’ll have to back your data up to an external partition to scan and recover from your internal hard drive and might have to go shopping for a second hard drive in a pinch. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s an extra step before you can settle in to the task at hand. Add in a $99 price tag for new users and a $49 upgrade price for owners of Data Rescue 3 and you can see where Data Rescue 4 still feels a bit like a premium utility for a focused set of professional users.

Data Rescue 4 For Mac

Bottom line

Price and need for an external hard drive aside, Data Rescue 4 remains your best hope for recovering data from a physically functional drive without having to send it to a dedicated outfit where technicians in clean rooms will replace drive components in clean rooms for hundreds—or thousands—of dollars.

Data Rescue 4’s recovery functions may not be the most exciting thing to watch, but it proves that your data can be resurrected even when you thought your hard drive was dead. It also shows that slow and steady—or as long as the task needs to be done well—can still win the race.

About the App

Data Rescue 4 Mac Download

• App name: Data Rescue 4
• App description: 2> /dev/null
  and press enter/return key. If you are prompted to enter your Mac's user password, enter it (when you type it, you wont see it on your screen/terminal.app but it would accept the input; this is to ensure no one can see your password on your screen while you type it. So just type password and press enter, even if you dont see it on your screen). Then wait for the command to finish.
• Run:
  brew install data-rescue

Done! You can now use Data Rescue 4.