Any digital camera owner who doesn't worry about years of photos suddenly disappearing either has a backup or lives in ignorance. We had a backup. It was a few months old, but we hadn't emptied off the flash media since, so it was current. But that didn't stop the emergency.

Teresa's MacBook Pro had a problem--it wouldn't go to sleep under battery power. Yes, we had an idea how to fix it, but since it's still under the extended warranty, why not get our money's worth? So we set up an appointment with the "genius" and took it in. Sure enough, it looked to only need a reinstall of the system software--no new computer for Teresa! So we went shopping while the installer ran. And ran. And ran. She finally canceled it (bad idea), and while the sleep problem was fixed, Teresa's data was a mess. Always backup before taking your computer in--we should've known better.

We thought everything was there until we realized that her iPhoto library had all her photos, but only the thumbnails, not the original. We were upset, to say the least. But there's a backup, right? Yeah, about that--I deleted it to backup Teresa's user folder before changing anything else--before we knew her library was messed up. Before I did anything else, though, I realized her user folder was much too big for that drive, so I just turned it off. When we realized the mistake, I was glad I hadn't done anything else with that drive--the data should still be safe.

So we installed Prosoft Data Rescue II--easy install, and simple interface. A fast scan took about 2 seconds, but it only found 8.5 MB worth of data. Clearly, we needed a Thorough Scan. The Thorough Scan takes about a minute per GB, at least it did on my MacBook--drive speed and computer speed will obviously affect this. After that scan, a post process ran on the 78,881 files it found on the drive, which took about another 15 minutes and narrowed it to 45,518 files. The Find Command located the iPhoto Library, but the 27.1 MB file size didn't look promising and only restored 24 photos, plus all of the thumbnails. So next, we did a Find for ".jpg" which resulted in 30,887 files. Sadly, there's no way to sort by file size, which would've allowed me to skip anything too small to be an actual original photo, but since a lot of filenames were lost, photos were listed with size built into the filename for many of them, which helped narrow down the list to 17,296. Once recovered, we found that the photos kept all their information, including dates, so besides filename, the files were mostly intact.

Overall, we're impressed with Data Rescue II. As far as we can tell, it restored all of our missing files, and by saving the scan file, we can easily go back and locate anything else we need. If you need to unerase, undelete, or otherwise restore lost files, we can speak from experience that Data Rescue II does the job.