So, you fragged your (or one of your) hard drives and you didn't have a backup of the important data that was on it. Disaster? Definitely. Impossible to recover? Hardly. Let me introduce you to FileSalvage. Although not perfect, this program should be able to recover 80-90% of your data with a little work and patience.
When you first open FileSalvage you will have a few options to choose from depending on what happened to your drive. Once you have chosen the appropriate option and the file formats that you want to recover the program will start to do its magic as shown in the picture above.
There is some guesswork involved though as nothing that is recovered has its original name attached to it. Everything is basically assigned a numerical value. This can be very disheartening if you have a lot of data on the drive that you need to sort through. Meaning you'll have to salvage everything and start opening files one by one to see what is what. That is if the file will even open.
A few problems I ran into were with InDesign files and some Photoshop files. With these it's a 50/50 chance it will open. I'm not sure why, but sometimes they just won't open. Most all other formats aren't a problem.
I tested the v6 beta and had the same problems as with v5 (although the beta didn't accept as many file formats). The real problem with FileSalvage for me is two fold:
1. Having to guess what is what. There are two other alternatives which actually show you the file structure of the drive and allow you to pick and choose what you want to salvage. You don't pick file types, you just have these programs scan your drive. This is something I'd like to see in FileSalvage, because some files are overlooked (ie. InDesign book documents, GoLive site documents, directories, etc). Above you can see how FileSalvage handles things (top) and one of the competitors named Boomerang (bottom). There is also a pricey service called VirtualLab which does things similar to Boomerang (and when I say pricey I really mean it).
2. Having to pick file formats instead of just scanning the whole drive and keeping the directories in tact. As you can see from above it could end up being very tedious to go through all these files and figuring out what is what.
Don't get me wrong though, this program does work. It just needs some fine tuning. I used FileSalvage on a drive that was mistakenly reinitialized when installing Windows within BootCamp. After salvaging everything on the drive which took a little over an hour, I then spent about 3 hours going through files trying to see what was what. I only got through about 5-10% of the data in that time before I became frustrated with the time it was taking and the fact that some of the files wouldn't open.
I just have no patience. But I'm sure most of you do. I would say that in times of dire strait FileSalvage is an essential tool in any Mac users arsenal. But if you don't need the data any time soon (or are short on patience as I am), I would hold off and try another solution. Here's hoping that v6 will feature some of the things I have talked about because it is a very promising piece of software and the support department is top-notch.
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