Product Reviews

Prosoft's Data Recycler X is a utility that aims to make recovering accidentally deleted files a reality. Yes, it really can retrieve files you threw away, but there's a significant caveat: data deleted without this software installed isn't protected and can't be recovered. It's very important to get this straight before going any further; this isn't a tool you keep on the shelf in case you might need it. If you want its benefits, install it and get it set up the way you want it before you actually need it.

When the software is installed it starts protecting any drives mounted at that time. Drives mounted later will have to be added to Data Recycler X's list manually, but this is a very simple process. Data Recycler X runs as an unobtrusive root-level process in the background, maintaining a list of deleted files and their locations on your disk. The space where the data structures of deleted files live on the hard disk is protected from being used by the operating system for storing any more files, which means that data, although no longer regarded by the operating system as existing, can be retrieved if necessary.

This isn't a simple space-hogging technique; Data Recycler doesn't just grab a portion of your drive's available space and remove it from regular use. Instead, it protects a percentage of a drive's space from being used for writing new data unless absolutely required. When you delete a file you only actually delete the reference to the data stored on the disk. Normally, the Mac OS is then free to write something else to that spot whenever it likes. With Data Recycler active, a proportion of 'free' space, defaulting to a few hundred megabytes for a volume of a few gigabytes in size, will be designated as 'use only if necessary', preserving the nominally deleted data for possible recovery at some point in the future. A directory of protected files is maintained by Data Recycler X, and items can be browsed

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in the application's main window and recovered to any disk at any time. This means it's even more important than normal to keep a good amount of space on your hard disks free, as if you run low on free space, Data Recycler won't be able to reserve much room for its protected space.

Other features include EWS, an early warning system that monitors a drive for possible data corruption and warns you as soon as it detects trouble brewing. Although it can't see corruption before anything has gone wrong, it should catch things much earlier than the normal nightmare scenario of finding out through your files being damaged or volumes not mounting.

Another option is the 'shredding' feature for deleting files you really don't want hanging around. A Data Recycler Express Shredder utility is installed alongside the main program, and dropping files on that will overwrite them with random data. Deleting files held in Data Recycler's cache of preserved items will also 'shred' the files beyond any chance of recovery. Three different security levels are offered for shredding; Clear, Sanitize and Secure. The first two meet the US Department of Defence's stringent data security guidelines, while the Secure option exceeds them by overwriting the data several times. This process will certainly beat any commercial data recovery utility, and possibly high-level computer forensic tools as well.

You'll find that the operating system trashes a fair number of files in normal operation, but, as the list of files being tracked is split between an operating system set and a more user-oriented Trash one, it's not hard to find what you're more likely to want. This list is also presented on a drive-by-drive basis, so it's easy to find items deleted from particular disks.

The most important thing to remember is that you can only hope to recover files trashed after Data Recycler X was installed. Because OS X juggles so many files as it runs, the space on a disk where a file's data sits is liable to be overwritten soon after it has been trashed in the normal way. In addition, uninstalling Data Recycler will remove the ability to recover recently trashed files, and even if you then reinstall the software, it will only be able to track newly deleted items. For such emergencies Prosoft's Data Rescue X would be needed.

This software is capable of performing the miracle of recovering files you thought were gone for good. So if this sounds like a safety net you'd like to have, install it now before you need it.