Review: WonderShare Data Recovery for Mac

• Article 19 of 19
• MacUser, January 2011

The interface is simple, although clearly written by someone with English as a second language. The program has two simple options: ‘deleted recovery’ and ‘deep recovery’. Click on either and in a rare moment of user-unfriendlliness, you’ll get a /dev/rdisk breakdown of disk partitions and their format types where available. Click on a partition, select Start Scan and Data Recovery will start looking. That’s it. By default, the program will search for documents, images, archives, and music and video files, but you can deselect options that aren’t relevant using the giant push buttons in the main interface before you begin the scan.

When Data Recovery has finished, it will present you with a list of files. You can click on any file and if it’s possible, the program will try to use QuickView to display a preview of the file. If it’s one you want, click a checkbox next to the file. When you’ve finished selecting the files you want to recover, click on the Recover button and they’ll get saved to a location of your choice.

In use, WonderShare Data Recovery is very user-friendly, compared to something like Data Rescue. It can run straight off a standard hard drive, unlike Data Rescue which requires a drive without ownership permissions enabled. It only needs to be authenticated once to run and it’s very easy to work through. Annoyingly, once you start it running, you can’t eject disks any more, not even DVDs, even if they’re not being used, but that’s a minor niggle.

The quickest option, Deleted Recovery, lets you scan quickly through a hard drive for files that have been trashed, forced deleted, etc, taking just a few seconds to scan through a 90GB partition. It will then break down the files into a list sub-divided by location – your Documents folder, Pictures folder, etc. So far, so easy. However, deleted recovery has a few limitations. The first is that it only works with Mac HFS+ drives, so Bootcamp partitions and USB flash drives aren’t going to work with this. The second is that actually recovers next to nothing. A Deleted Recovery scan of a hard drive brimming with deleted files found just 17, few of them important. Even filling the Trash up with files, deleting them, then running another scan didn’t increase that total by a single file.

So a much better bet is Deep Recovery. This works not just with HFS+ drives, but also with NTFS and FAT partitions, so you can work with more or less the full range of drives that are likely to come your way. However, Deep Recovery will take considerably longer: in the case of our 90GB HFS+ partition, an hour and a half, and a 4GB FAT32-formatted USB drive took roughly 10 minutes.

It then arranges the found documents according to type and sub-type, rather than location: PDF, HTML, DOCX, et al for documents, GIF, TIFF, etc for images and so on. You’ll need to rely on QuickView even more here to identify files since filenames are rarely correct.

In comparison to Data Rescue, Deep Recovery was considerably more successful at locating deleted files, particularly on the FAT-formatted drive, locating 2,200 files compared with just over 1,200 with Data Rescue. Indeed, it was almost too successful, since virtually every cached web file from Internet Explorer and Safari was located and even corrupt and damaged files were found. On the 80GB drive, the 86,000 files Deep Recovery found were almost impossible to sift through. But it did find the files we deleted that Deleted Recovery didn’t find.

Data Recovery – at least in Deep Recovery mode – does what it says on the tin. If you want to find a file on a partition in almost any standard format, it will do it, and it’s a good deal less fussy and more thorough than Data Rescue. However, you will need to be patient in finding the exact file you want.