FileSalvage 5.1 Data Recovery for Mac OS X

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

What They Say

Written specifically for Mac OS X, FileSalvage includes powerful features that give the user greater control and flexibility in analyzing and retrieving lost data:

Safety first - FileSalvage will never write to the disk or device being salvaged from. This makes the software “risk-free”, as it does not attempt to repair a disk or alter its contents. Instead FileSalvage simply reads it and copies the relevant files to a destination of the user’s choice.

Works anywhere - FileSalvage is device and file system independent. This means that the user can recover files from a hard drive, digital camera, USB key, PC disk, FLASH card, scratched CD, and most storage media that work with the Mac.

Searches free space - On HFS+ volumes, the user can limit FileSalvage to scan only the free space of a volume to recover files from.  This produces huge speed efficiency and means that the task of recovering files can be accomplished much quicker. By default, “Undelete” scans for “free space” whilst “Salvage” will scan the entire space on a device.

Recovers files after a disk or device has been formatted - Have an initialized disk or other device with files that you want back? No problem! So long as the drive was not securely initialized, FileSalvage should be able to recover the files from the drive.

Recovers files from corrupt media – Data corruption does not stop FileSalvage from working. In fact it will happily process an entire corrupted file system for intact data and recover whole or partial files wherever it finds them.

FileSalvage works on faulty hardware - FileSalvage can also recover data from mechanically unsound devices. The software uses several tried and tested methods, which in addition SubRosaSoft has improved upon, to read the same piece of information and to automatically skip of areas of the file system that are fully unreadable. By employing these methods, FileSalvage is able to recover data from sources that may have appeared to other software to be too physically broken to use.

Preview - Allows the user to preview a range of available files before choosing to recover them. Using the underlying architecture of Mac OS X, FileSalvage can read and display audio, video, image, text and other files.

Recover images - FileSalvage can analyze and recover files from most third party tool disk images such as standard ISO, EnCase® (unencrypted images only), UNIX dd, Drive Genius™, and SubRosaSoft CopyCatX™. 

What I Say

I think SubRosaSoft made this application just for me. I’ve had to reinstall Mac OS X on my machine more than once due to issues with various beta-strength apps I run in real time on my productivity machine. We review so you don’t have to and we take the hits sometimes when those apps behave badly. So I need a tool like this to help me with the oopsies.

There is a 47-page manual that says that FileSalvage can recover over 70 file format types from just about any kind of storage media.

One of the smart moves with the most recent version is being able to choose which filetypes to recover. Say I want to recover only PDFs. I can flag those now.

Perhaps the naysayers who reviewed this app didn’t think to save to a different storage medium and not to the same device. FileSalvage refuses to do that. Invest in external storage of some kind to use this app. Perhaps the smartest move was to get MacFixIt to host the Forums for SubRosaSoft. What an excellent idea! By going there I learned which file formats are recoverable and which are not yet supported.

To my delight, the Expert mode allowed me to see files I didn’t know existed and to open them to see what they contained. I have a bunch of QuickTime movies and other stuff on my system that must be artifacts. I can see and read them and delete them if I need to now.

The program is designed to work off the DVD-ROM and with large drives, it is methodical in its pursuit of the truth when examining a drive.

If you have a scratched CD to recover, by dragging a copy of FileSalvage from the DVD to the desktop seems to work fine.

Face it. FileSalvage is a three-trick pony and it does its job very well. It finds deleted files and recovers them. It can salvage files from an unmountable drive and it does a fantastic job “exploring” a volume. But you could do the same thing using Unix commands. I think you are paying a good chunk of money for a pretty GUI. But for the non-Geeks, paying that premium is worth the price.

This is a “no –sweat” program and cheap insurance when the “undo” command doesn’t cut it and files have been emptied out of the trash and have become “unrecoverable”. Just invest in some external storage media so those files can be salvaged, okay?