Data Rescue PC3 brings to the Windows universe the same high-powered data-recovery technology that makes Prosoft's Data Rescue 3 the leading recovery software for the Mac. Compared with other Windows-based data-recovery apps I reviewed recently—Active@ File Recovery for Windows, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, and OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro—Data Rescue PC3 ranks high enough to share our Editor's Choice ranking with OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro. It doesn't match OnTrack's feature set, but it recovers lost files quickly and reliably, and it has one major advantage that the other apps don't: it ships on a bootable CD. This means you can boot from the CD to recover files when you can't boot from your hard disk. And even if your system boots normally, you might prefer to run the app from the CD to avoid the possibility that you'll overwrite a lost file by installing the app to your hard disk.

Getting Started

In its basic operation, Data Rescue PC3 resembles other recovery apps. Compared to rival products, its interface is better suited to non-professional users, but you'll still need a basic understanding of the difference between a physical disk and the partitions (essentially, drives identified by drive letters) that a physical disk can contain. A wizard-style series of dialogs lets you select a drive or partition from which you want to recover files. The same dialogs provide a directory tree that lists every existing file on your disk, in case you're trying to recover one or more files a damaged or unbootable disk.

An advanced feature, for tech professionals only, lets you add driver software needed for reading RAID and other multi-disk storage units. After selecting a drive or partition, the program scans your disk in a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size and technology of the drive. The app needed only about ten minutes to scan an 80GB SSD but more than an hour to scan a conventional 1TB disk.

After scanning, the app displays its list of found files in a tree-structured list that's organized according to file types such as Pictures and Documents, not according to the actual directory tree of your disk. This makes it easy to find files of specific types such as DOCX or PNG. At this point you can select one or all files to save to a directory or drive that you specify. Or if you want to check out whether a file is fully recoverable, you can right-click on it, choose View from the menu, and open the file in your system's default program for that file type—for example, Adobe Reader for PDF files.

My Results

I tried out Data Rescue PC3 on an SSD drive where I had deleted dozens of files either from the Windows command prompt or from other programs that don't send delete files to the Recycle Bin where it's easy to recover them. After I scanned the drive, and set the app's file filters to show only deleted files, I got a clear list of the files I had deleted. I restored them to a different drive, and here's where I discovered that the app produced mixed results—though the results were effectively the same as the results I got when I tried the same scenario with OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro.

Most of my files were fully recovered, but until I opened each one in turn, I couldn't identify which ones had not been recovered even though the program said they were. (Instead of the file I wanted, the program had "recovered" a file with nothing in it.) In every case, these un-recovered files were fairly large files that had presumably been fragmented on my disk, and the recovery software had no way of knowing how to put together the various fragments. This situation is more likely to occur on SSDs than traditional platter-style disks, since SSDs deliberately store large files in multiple fragments—unlike traditional disks where there's a definite speed benefit to keeping a complete file in one place.

Tied for Tops

It probably won't matter to most users that Data Rescue PC3 doesn't have all the options available in data-recovery software from OnTrack, Active@, or Stellar Phoenix. For example, it doesn't have an option to make a "quick scan" instead of a standard, deep scan, and it doesn't try to recover data from optical disks. But it does include the drive-cloning feature found in all its rivals, so that you can try to copy data from a physically-failing drive to backup media and recover files from there. And, most of all, it comes on a bootable CD, so it's ready for action when your system won't boot at all. Data Rescue PC3 has much of the power built into OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro and it's easier for non-professionals to use. If you haven't already equipped yourself with a data recovery app, in case of emergency, this is one that's worth buying now so you'll have it when you need it.

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