Stellar Pheonix Macintosh Data Recovery

Synopsis:

We had some challenges with this review including a product key that didn't work. This did however give us a chance to try out Stellars tech support(used email support) who had this issued resolved in a couple hours. We found the scanning time a bit long for both the simple and comprehensive scanning methods but were pleased to see good results when the appropriate scan is selected. This makes Stellar one of only a handful of companies to create a quality data recovery software that runs on the Macintosh OS.

Overall Rating

Delivering on Marketing Promises

Overall Capabilities

Price

Category:

Recovery Software

Company Claims:

"Powerful and user-friendly Mac Recovery application that provides complete recovery of lost, deleted or corrupted data including documents, music, videos, pictures, e-mails and PDFs. The read-only Data Recovery Mac software is built with highly graphical user-interface that makes it self-explanatory without any prior technical understanding.

Features of Mac Data Recovery v 4.0

Designed for Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard and supports snow leopard
Compatible with HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper and FAT file system volumes.
Recovers all types of files from your hard drive.
This Mac File Recovery Software recovers deleted files.
Recovers images, videos, pictures, music from digital camera media and iPods.
Embedded with advance options like Mac Style Find option, user-friendly GUI, fast scanning, and searching of lost, deleted, or formatted FAT volumes."

Price:

$99(USD)

Armor-IT's Testing Methods:

We installed Stellar Pheonix Macintosh Data Recovery on a Dual G4 powermac, connected an assortment of devices ranging from a 512MB USB 1.0 flash drive to a 1.5TB Western Digital Green drive. We attempted recovery from the devices with files deleted, drives formated and even tried one NTFS drive just to see how it held up. Any tests that failed to produce good results on the simpler mode were re-tested using it's more comprehensive scanning mode.

Results:

Running in the Quick Recovery mode was the only "Fast" mode, the other modes were painfully slow regardless of the type or size of device used in each round of testing. The advanced modes did prove worth the wait in most cases as they consistently returned more than 80% of the test data from formatted media and nearly 100% of deleted files.

The test involving an NTFS(windows) formatted hard drive was the only abysmal failure. This is not surprising as Macs do not include complete support for Windows formatted drives. Normally this shouldn't be a concern but if you just used you Mac to reformat a previously windows formatted hard drive you will need a different utility running on a PC to recover those files. This did not affect this programs score as Stellar makes no claims to recover NTFS but we see this situation a lot and felt it worth testing and mentioning.

Pros:

Consistently returns high percentages of lost, deleted or formatted files.
Reasonably priced.

Cons:

Painfully slow Processing times
Menus could use more descriptive buttons(maybe V5)

How well did Stellar deliver on it's Promises?

Stellar has definitely delivered on all promises relating to capability and types of device or format it can handle. We think a little more work is necessary either in the GUI or possibly in the form of pop up advice windows to truly meet the ease of use statments for non-technical users. Stellar definitely makes up for any short comings in the interface by providing excellent support service with fast response times.

Recommend and Rating:

Armor-IT Data Recovery highly recommends Stellars Macintosh Data Recovery software for any Macintosh user who has deleted files, suffered from a corrupted operating system or accidentally formatted a drive that was previously formatted for Macintosh.

Overall Rating

Delivering on Marketing Promises

Overall Capabilities

Price