I probably made a big mistake when I thought that this blog was going to be just that – a platform over which I get to share my expertise so that I can help people! At the rate we’re going, I think I might just be quitting my full-time job soon to run this here blog on a full-time basis as it’s turning into something of a portal over which I find myself facilitating consultations of sorts!
So I have indeed been contemplating data recovery as a new direction of focus, but admittedly this was prior to landing my new job. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t go down that path though because then I’d probably be in direct competition with the likes of Stellar Data Recovery, with their Professional Data Recovery Software release for Mac devices proving just how much of a specialised field this truly is. A copy of Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac came into my possession nevertheless and I hadn’t had the time or any real opportunity to do a proper review until now, following what typically happens when people hear that you’re in some way involved in the IT industry – they bring faulty or broken computers so that you can “have a look!”
I could very well have gone ahead with my data recovery consultation business and perhaps acquired the Stellar Data Recovery Technician licence for IT professionals or perhaps even the Data Recovery Toolkit, but the one that came into my possession which I’ll be reviewing is the Professional edition. The Professional edition is briefly listed as offering basic file recovery, but that is a total understatement because with that comes RAW recovery and a whole lot more.
Performance
So here’s where it gets a little precarious with data recovery, because it all comes down to one thing – does the software actually recover my data or not? In my case it was the former rather than the latter, but this is where the performance gets separated as either a really good experience or a really bad one. All the reviews I read prior to trying it myself suggested that I had an 80%-plus chance of success and success is exactly what I enjoyed with its use.
This particular version comes with a macOS Mojave update, which amongst other things make it fall right in-line with the fundamental selling point of Apple devices in that they’re easy to use. Stellar Data Recovery Professional’s interface is exactly that – easy to use, with an unintimidating GUI I would imagine as an IT professional, it would be welcomed by the ordinary user.
I was looking to recover four files in particular which were stored in three formats (video, pic and an OpenOffice document saved as a Docx file) and that’s exactly what I managed to do, following the quick scan that lists all recoverable files once the process is complete. I did the deep scan too for good measure, but what I should probably mention is that the files I was looking to recover had been mistakenly deleted on just one of my devices connected to my iCloud, which as you’ll know is a process which is perpetuated on all my connected devices, so the files were lost to all devices.
Verdict
I tried the software on all three devices and it worked on each of them, taking longest to scan my MacBook because of the size of the hard drive, I guess.
The trial version is available at: https://www.stellarinfo.com/data-recovery-mac.php
