A few months ago a representative of Stellar Data Recovery contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing their product Stellar Phoenix Macintosh, a data recovery application. I was happy to oblige. At long last, here’s my assessment.

If you’ve read many of my tech tip articles you may know that I’m a staunch advocate for setting up robust, redundant and automated data backup systems. If one has such systems in place then one’s likelihood of actually needing a tool like Stellar Phoenix Macintosh should be slim. However, the need for such tools can still arise for a myriad of reasons. Maybe one hasn’t yet copied photos from their camera’s SD storage card to their computer. Maybe one uses a USB flash drive to move files around and doesn’t backup this drive. Maybe one’s backup is misconfigured and it isn’t actually backing up an important folder. Any such drive could fail or a user could accidentally delete a file. Thus, anybody could end up needing a data recovery tool such as Stellar Phoenix Macintosh.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh has a simple user-interface which includes buttons to let you try to recover data from various types of drives including iPods. It also has a button dedicated to photo  recovery. Within the main Drive Recovery section it provides options to try to recover deleted files, files from re-formatted drives and from drives which don’t mount. I happened to have two non-mounting drives sitting around. One was an external firewire hard drive and the other was a USB flash drive. Both were personal drives which I’d used for years. They’d each stopped working properly in the past six months. Nothing critical was on either drive so I’d only made half-hearted attempts to figure out what was wrong with the drives previously. I’d been unable to get either drive to mount. Not surprisingly, Stellar Phoenix Macintosh wasn’t able to see them or recovery any data from them. I didn’t really expect that it would since I suspect that there were physical problems with the drives. If I had really needed to get data from these drives I would have sent the drives to a professional data recovery company, like Drive Savers which has a strong track record of being able to recover data.

Next, I took a fully-functioning external firewire drive that contained a backup copy of some of my music and movies. I put all of my files into the Trash and emptied the Trash. Then I asked Stellar Phoenix Macintosh to try to restore the files. I used it’s Deleted File Recovery feature. I showed it the external drive and I let it scan the entire 60 GB drive. Understandably, this is a time consuming process since it needs to scan every block. I don’t know how long it took since I went to bed, but I’m sure it took more then an hour. By morning it had finished, but I didn’t have time to finish restoring my files so it conveniently let me save the scan file, presumably some sort of directory of the drive. Subsequently, I used Stellar Phoenix Macintosh’s Resume Recovery feature. This let me pick up where I left off.

Stellar Phoenix correctly listed the folders which I had deleted. I started to navigate through this folder list and it correctly listed the names of sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. What was annoying was that Stellar Phoenix’s window could not be re-sized. Additionally, the 3 sections within it’s window could not be re-sized either. This made it cumbersome to navigate through the folder hierarchy. This is a significant short-coming of the application’s user-interface. Up to this point, I’d like the interface. It had been simple, buttons well labeled and explanations of their function were frequently listed on screen. So it was quite jarring and annoying to suddenly realize that I couldn’t resize the window at all. However, I continued with the data restore. I selected about 10 mp3 files as well as a number of PDF documents and Microsoft Word files. I clicked the Recover button, waited a few seconds and the files were saved to a new folder on my Mac’s Desktop. I was then very disappointed when I tried to open these files and not a single one could be opened properly. I’m not sure why. Stellar Phoenix had done an admirable job of seeing the deleted files as well as their file names and folder structure. All of this is important, but it failed in the final and most important step of successfully recovering the files.

I wanted to give Stellar Phoenix another chance so I took a healthy 1 GB USB flash drive, formatted it, copied a few files onto it and then deleted them a few minutes later. I then had Stellar Phoenix scan the drive which took about 10 minutes. It was not able to recover the folder structure or the file names, but it did create folders for each type of file which it found. In other words, it created folders for PDFs, JPEGs, Word and RTF files, for example. I then asked Stellar Phoenix to recover the files. It did so and all of the files opened properly. I was pleased with the results in this simple test. I should mention, however,  that in a real world situation in which one might need to only recover a few files from a hard drive that has been used for years, the inability of data recovery software to recovery filenames and folder structures can mean that one could have to spend a fair amount of time locating the few desired files from a larger pile of recovered files.

In conclusion, Stellar Phoenix could be useful as a data recovery tool, certainly for recently deleted files and possibly in other situations. However, the lessons that I take away from these experiments are that data recovery is not always possible. Even when it is possible it can be time consuming to conduct drive scans and then locate the particular files you need. If you need to employ a professional data recovery service, it can be very expensive. Thus, I think it’s more prudent to setup, monitor and test robust, redundant and automated backup systems so you can hopefully avoid having to rely on data recovery products.

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Do you need to recover files that were deleted from a Mac’s hard drive? Here’s a quick overview of three options.

Option 1 – By far the easiest way to recover a file is to restore it from the most recent backup. This is why I’m such a strong proponent of setting up a comprehensive backup system including automated TimeMachine or CrashPlan backups. By default, TimeMachine runs every hour and CrashPlan runs every 15 minutes. Here’s are tech tips I wrote about how to restore files from Time Machine and CrashPlan backups.

This option is appropriate for a wide range of situations including: accidentally deleting a file and realizing it a minute or a month later; suffering from a malfunctioning hard drive, losing your computer or having it stolen. Assuming that you make multiple and frequent backup copies of your data this option has a very high recovery success rate.

This is the last of the good options. The two remaining options are either expensive, time consuming or have a much lower chance or success — or some combination thereof.

Option 2 – Use data recovery software such as ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue. Data Rescue and comparable applications can search a hard drive for deleted files and it can try to search a malfunctioning hard drive for files. Both of these processes can take hours to run and their success is far from guaranteed. When a file has is deleted it’s not really removed from the hard drive. Instead, the entry for that file is removed from an invisible list of all files and the space where the file resides on the hard drive is marked as available for re-use. Depending upon how much time has elapsed since the file was deleted it may or may not have been over-written. If a hard drive is failing who knows if you’ll be able to recovery any files from it.

Option 3 – Use a professional data recovery company like DriveSavers. DriveSavers has been around since the mid 1980s. They have a stellar reputation and success rate. In the rare cases that I’ve had a client who needed professional data recovery, I’ve often used DriveSavers and they have fortunately been able to recover most of the needed data. The downside of professional data recovery companies is the relatively high cost.

In the past decade, I’ve only sent two hard drives to DriveSavers. One hard drive was from an Mac made in the mid 1990s. It hadn’t been used in years and my client suddenly realized that she needed some data from it. The hard drive no longer worked properly. She spent about $2500 to recover a few dozen files which she needed.

In the other instance, a woman phoned me after most of her iPhoto Library suddenly vanished before her eyes. She didn’t have any backup of the hard drive so we sent the hard drive to DriveSavers. She paid about $1500 for the recovery work. DriveSavers recovered thousands of jpeg photos, but some of them were random clip art files so my client then had to spend countless hours weeding through the recovered files.

In my opinion, options 2 and 3 aren’t really attractive options. They are expensive, time-consuming and the odds of getting all of the files needed are not as high as I’d like. In comparison the cost to buy a couple of backup hard drives or to pay for CrashPlan’s online backup storage system is much less. Please setup an automated, redundant and reliable backup system for your Mac.

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If you need to try to recover digital photos from your camera’s compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card you should know about Glazer’s Camera’s data recovery services.

Recently, a client needed this service and Glazer’s was able to recover over 1200 RAW and JPEG images from 3 compact flash cards which my client had erased (reformatted) in her camera. My client had already copied the RAW and JPEG images onto an external hard drive but they mysteriously disappeared. Upon discovering that the images were not on the external hard drive I recommended a professional data recovery service which would have cost hundreds of dollars. A friend of my client came up with a faster and much less costly option.

My client took her compact flash cards to Glazer’s where they were able to successfully recover all of the missing images. They charged $30 per card and then copied the recovered images onto her external hard drive. So, if you live in the greater Seattle area and you ever need this service, keep Glazer’s in mind. Of course, to reduce the likelihood that you ever need this service please follow these tips for protecting digital images provided by DriveSavers in one of their recent newsletters.

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The focus of this article is to describe the essential components of a comprehensive backup system for your Macintosh computer and to describe a simple comprehensive backup system for one Mac. This article’s recommendations are appropriate for anybody with a few Macs which they would like to backup. If you have a larger network of Macs then other applications and approaches would be more appropriate.

I believe that there are two types of people in this world. Those who have lost data and those who will lose data. Thus, I feel strongly about the importance of backing up your computer. A comprehensive backup system will help you minimize the amount of data that you could ever lose.

We all store valuable files on our computer though what is valuable varies by person. For some it is email messages, calendar data and address book information. For others it is their Quicken or QuickBooks information. For others still it is their digital pictures, home movies and music. For some it is all of these kinds of files. We increasingly rely on computers, so minimizing downtime and recovering quickly from problems need to be incorporated into a comprehensive backup system.

In some ways, a backup system is analogous to an insurance policy. We hope we never need to rely on it, but we’re very glad that we have it if it is needed. And just as different types of insurance policies provide different amounts of coverage, not all backup systems provide the same levels of protection, however, any level of protection is better then no protection at all. Here is a list of the essential components in a comprehensive backup system.

• It should backup all files on your computer
• It should run frequently and automatically
• It should produce multiple backup copies of your files. The old rule of thumb is that if it’s important enough to backup once then it’s important enough to backup twice.
  
• The multiple copies should be kept on multiple disks which are securely stored in multiple locations. One of these locations should be off-site or, if on-site, in a Class 125 fireproof safe.
  
• You need to monitor the backup system at least weekly to ensure that it is making backup copies of your data.
  
• You need to test your backup system a few times each year to ensure that it’s working properly and so you’ll know how to use it to restore a file under pressure, when a problem arises

The Tao of Backup web site does a very good job of describing the importance of each of these components in an entertaining and educational way.

Backup systems allow us to recover from a range of problems that can occur. The most common type of problem is accidentally deleting  a file and needing to get it back. Another all to common problem is hard drive failure in which case we’d need to recover all files. Although rare, burglaries, fire, flood and theft all occur and would require us to recover all of our files too. To recover an accidentally deleted file or to recover from a hard drive failure all one needs is a local, on-site backup copy of their files. However, to recover from a burglary, fire or flood can often require having an off-site backup copy of your data.

While I encourage everybody to setup a comprehensive backup system, I understand that not everybody has the time or money to commit to such a system so I’ll re-iterate that any level of protection is better than none at all and a pretty good backup can be surprisingly affordable.

In more practical terms here is a simple, comprehensive backup system for one Mac. Start by purchasing two external hard drives. Partition each drive into two parts. Configure Carbon Copy Cloner (donations requested) to make a full bootable backup of your Mac to one of the partitions on each of the external drives. Carbon Copy Cloner can be scheduled to perform automatic backups whenever the hard drive is connected. Configure Time Machine, which comes included in Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, to perform automated hourly backups of all files on your Mac to the other partition on each of the external drives. On a designated day each week you can switch between the two hard drives. The idle drive should be stored off-site at a secure location across the street or across town. If you’re not inclined to buy two backup hard drives then you could supplement your one on-site hard drive with off-site backups made by CrashPlan. CrashPlan is an online backup system. They have different pricing for personal and business use. (I’ve now written Tech Tip articles about using CrashPlan for either personal or business use.)

The reason to use both Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine is even though Time Machine backs up all files on a hard drive it does not do so in a manner which lets one start (boot) their Mac from the Time Machine backup drive. Thus, Carbon Copy Cloner is a nice supplement to Time Machine since it’s focus is making a bootable backup drive. Having another hard drive from which one can boot their Mac can minimize downtime and can be helpful in the event of problem with the internal hard drive.

Monitoring the system is easy. To monitor Time Machine simply click on its Menu Bar icon to see when it last ran and/or look for its Menu Bar icon to spin while it is performing a backup. When you swap the backup drives you should see Carbon Copy Cloner automatically start.

Apple has an article which provides instructions on how to restore files from a Time Machine backup. Practice this a few times so you have confidence that Time Machine is working and so you’ll be calm if you need to rely on Time Machine for real. An important test of the Carbon Copy Cloner backup is to go to the Startup Disk System Preference, select this disk and then restart your Mac to ensure that you can boot from this backup. To determine which drive was used to startup your Mac, go to the Apple menu, select About This Mac and see which disk is listed as the startup disk or use Disk Utility.

A few final notes. Archives are different from backups and I think you should archive your more important data as well. I’ll talk about archives in a future article.

TidBits’ has written a couple of excellent Take Control PDF books about backing up Macs. Check them out:

Take Control of Mac Backups and Take Control of Easy Mac Backups

This article is the first in a series of articles that talk about Macintosh backup systems including specific products. Check my Tech Tip blog regularly for more articles in my Backup category.

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