Mac Data Recovery Software

Data Rescue 3

From what I’ve found out, Data Rescue 3 for Mac looks to be one of the better options for the recovery of data loss due to faulty hard drives or files which were deleted. Used by all major branches of the U.S Military, major intelligence agencies, and law enforcement, Data Rescue 3 recovers files of all types from your hard drive. Even if the drive only partially works, or fails to mount, you can recover either lost, deleted, or damaged files. There are options to either recover only the files you need, or the entire contents of the hard drive. What I like about Data Rescue 3 is that it comes with an emergency bootable DVD with no need to disassemble your computer.

In addition, you get free customer support by either phone or email. You can recover up to hundreds of file types, and if the file type you want to recover isn’t among those included, you can specify a user defined file type – vastly increasing your ability to recover all of your files.

Disk Drill Pro

Disk Drill Pro offers a wide array of Mac data recovery features, and consists of an impressive range of recovery options. These options include:

• Mac hard drive recovery
• File recovery for Mac
• Recover memory card
• Partition recovery
• Mac photo recovery
• iPod recovery

Disk Drill, designed specifically for Mac, allows you to recover all types of files in Mac OS X. There are four versions of the software, including a free basic version which lets you try the majority of features that are included in other paid versions. The basic version will allow you to scan your hard drive, but won’t allow you to recover those files, whereas the Pro, Expert and Enterprise versions will (as well as include many more advanced recovery features).

All file systems are supported, and you can run Mac data recovery software on HFS, HFS+, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, and EXT4. The Quick Scan in Disk Drill Pro scans the HFS+, FAT, and NTFS, but won’t be as precise as the Deep Scan which takes a lot longer, but is much more thorough because it attempts to extract every piece of data that it can. See the vast array of features that Disk Drill Pro offers.

MacKeeper Data Recovery

Not necessarily thought of as Mac data recovery software, MacKeeper offers a professional suite of tools to help manage all aspects of your computer’s hard drive. MacKeeper’s file recovery section scans your hard drive for deleted files that can still be restored. For restoration of files, file recovery needs to perform a deep scan of your machine which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. There’s nothing wrong with this, because the software is doing a deep scan of your Mac’s hard drive. Obviously, the more files you have, the longer this will take.

Once the scan has been completed, you can take a look at all the files found and recover only those that you need by selecting them with just one click. Note, when recovering these files you will need an external drive or storage device to avoid any errors.

File recovery in MacKeeper can restore a wide array of file types covering audio, video, photos, documents and archive. Another bonus for using MacKeeper is that you get a fully functional 15 day trial that includes all features as well as 24/7 personal support (you’ll also be able to find out all of the other cool things MacKeeper can do).

Remember to Back Up

Aside from having Mac data recovery software that you can use to restore lost or damaged files, you can ensure that you don’t lose any files in the first place by backing up. I highly recommend Backblaze for backing up your Mac, but we’ve covered more options in our Mac backup blog post.

Is there any Mac data recovery software you’re using that I haven’t mentioned here? Leave a comment and I’ll update the post to include it.

Recover Your Mac’s Data with Recovery Software is a post from: Best Mac Software

They have three different paid tax software:

• H&R Block Basic
• H&R Block Deluxe
• H&R Block Premium

Here’s the breakdown of the services:

H&R Block Basic Tax Software

H&R Block At Home Basic is for simple tax situations. It includes everything you need to easily complete your federal taxes. It’s ideal for those who have very simple tax situations and easy for first-time users. The program automatically double-checks for errors and import last year’s tax data from H&R Block At Home software and TurboTax software.

H&R Block Deluxe Tax Software

H&R Block At Home Deluxe is best for those taxpayers who own a home or have investments. It includes everything you need to easily complete your federal and state taxes. The program automatically double-checks for errors and includes personalized tax guidance, advanced tools to maximize mortgage interest deductions, and assistance on investment income and stock options. It also includes free tax advice from a community of tax specialists and live audit support. Import last year’s tax data from H&R Block At Home software and TurboTax software. One state return included.

H&R Block Premium Tax Software

H&R Block At Home Premium is best for taxpayers who are self-employed or own rental property. It includes everything you need to easily complete your federal and state taxes. The program automatically double-checks for errors and includes personalized tax guidance, advanced tools to maximize mortgage interest deductions, assistance on investment income and stock options, Schedule C guidance, help with rental income deductions, and advanced tax calculators. It also includes free tax advice from a community of tax specialists, live audit support and one free session with an H&R Block tax professional if you have a specific tax question or get stuck. Import last year’s tax data from H&R Block At Home software and TurboTax software. One state return included.

With a multitude of options there’s no need to be any more frustrated than you have to. Use tax software for Mac to file your taxes.

Mac Tax Software is a post from: Best Mac Software

Backblaze, one of the backup services mentioned in that post, have updated their online backup, dubbed Backblaze 2.0. Here’s a rundown of some of the updates:

• Unlimited File Size: You can now backup any file type and any file size. That includes any large movie files you have stored on your Mac.
• Automatic Throttle: I personally like this improvement the best. Automatic throttling means that Backblaze will use your Internet connection efficiently. If your computer is a MacBook Pro and you use different Internet connections, your online backup will be adjusted to the speed of the connection.
• Faster Transfer Speed: The unlimited bandwidth you get from Backblaze hasn’t changed, you still get that. However, what has changed is that Backblaze will now batch many smaller files into fewer larger files which means that your backup will run 25 times faster.

To see some of the other updates Backblaze have made to their online backup check out the Backblaze website.

Backblaze Online Backup Updates to 2.0 is a post from: Best Mac Software

MacCleaning is a nifty menubar utility that effortlessly monitors your hard drive for free space, cleans up system junk, and offers ejecting mounted drives with just one click. Instead of over promising and under-delivering, MacCleaning does a very efficient job.

Recently, the creators of MacCleaning Pro (EaseUS) have upgraded the tool, and now instead of a menubar only application, it is now a fully fledged piece of Mac software in its own right. It has been renamed CleanGenius 2.0.

Like many utility programs for Mac, CleanGenius 2.0 helps clean up your:

• System Caches
• User Caches
• System Logs
• User Logs
• User Trash
• User Downloads

Additionally, CleanGenius 2.0 can help you with uninstalling applications and has a disk space monitor to help keep an eye out on how much of your hard drive you’re using.

Where I think this software really shines, especially for Mac users who don’t run a lot of utilities on their machines, is the alert for when hard drive space reaches a critical size. For instance you can opt to receive a warning when the free space on your hard drive reaches 10, 20, 30, or 40 percent. I wouldn’t set this to 10 or 20 percent, because I think you’ll begin to experience some serious operating issues at that point. But at about 35% is where I’d be comfortable with.

If you’re looking for an easy to use utility program for your Mac, you’d be hard pressed to find one easier than CleanGenius.

CleanGenius 2.0 Review is a post from: Best Mac Software

Disk Expert is a hard-drive management program for Macs, and assists you in locating the files which are taking up the most room on your Mac’s hard drive. This is our first video review, and I had to edit (and record) this a few times until I was happy enough with it.

I really liked Disk Expert. The UI is very smooth, yet displays so much information. It’s one of the best looking maintenance utilities for Mac that I’ve seen in a long time. It won’t be leaving my hard drive for a while that’s for sure.

I didn’t mention this in the video review, but Disk Expert is able to scan external drives too.

Enjoy the video!

A Review of Nektony’s Disk Expert is a post from: Best Mac Software

As you can see, the optimization section of MacKeeper consists of three items – Update Tracker, Login Items, and Default Apps. Let’s take a look at Update Tracker.

Update Tracker in MacKeeper

Update tracker works by checking each application installed on your Mac and seeing if there’s a new version. The applications on your Mac which are marked as up-to-date are seen as green, and any out-of-date application is seen as red. Any out-of-date software on your Mac can be updated by clicking on the update button. Here’s how my Mac looked before running Update Tracker:

So, I clicked on the Update All icon and began to have some issues. My intention at this point was to show you how my apps looked once they were all updated. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

I had about 38 pieces of software which required updating, so I clicked the Update All button. The first piece of software I had problems with was Comic Life – MacKeeper froze about 3.5 MBs into the download. I then quit the application thinking it was a software issue, then went through the same process – the same issue occurred. I tried to update another app, and at this time, the progress bar and all subsequent updates froze. Enough was enough at this point so I contacted the Live Chat from within MacKeeper (which is an awesome idea). Unfortunately, the best they could give me was to shut down the MacKeeper process from within Utilities and to try again, and if this didn’t happen, then just download the programs from their developers website.

Since there are some apps on this list that I only use once every few months, this was a pretty futile solution, so I decided to go through the apps which I use most and update them from within MacKeeper. Unfortunately, this was inconsistent. Some of the programs updated, and some didn’t, freezing about 10MBs away from downloading. Very frustrating.

Login Items in MacKeeper

The Login Items part of MacKeeper allows you to control which programs start when you login to your Mac, and which don’t.

You can control these programs via the checkboxes on the side, or even add/remove items from the list. I didn’t have any issues with this part of MacKeeper, and I found that it worked great. It actually allowed me to remove items which I never even knew were starting up whenever I logged in.

Default Apps in MacKeeper

When you run Default Apps for the first time it will scan your Mac’s hard drive to look for associations between programs and file types. It allows you to define which program opens which type of file. It also shows current associations between all file types and applications which open them.

You can select which software is applicable for the file type, and then also choose from a range of different filetypes to which you want to associate that program with. When I reviewed the list MacKeeper gave me, I was pretty happy with the current programs and associations, so unless there’s anything you just have to have changed, leave things in here as they are.

Conclusion

Aside from the issues I had with the Update Tracker, the rest of MacKeeper’s optimization section worked pretty well. However, it truly won’t be an optimization piece of software until they fix the issues with downloads timing out and freezing up.

MacKeeper is available for just $39.95. Even with the issues I had, this is still a great deal, especially when you consider all that you get a whole suite of tools bundled into one program.

Keep Your Mac Up to Date with MacKeeper is a post from: Best Mac Software

Enter MacCleaning. MacCleaning is a nifty menubar utility that effortlessly monitors your hard drive for free space, cleans up system junk, and offers ejecting mounted drives with just one click. Instead of over promising and under-delivering, MacCleaning does a very efficient job.

MacCleaning Options

In the preferences, there’s an option to be warned when you free space drops below a certain percentage. Currently, those percentages are at 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. What I like about this is that you can set to be warned and then run the program to help you free up some space. I probably wouldn’t set it to 10%, so I’d say the least you need to be warned at is 20%.

MacCleaning lets you choose which places you wish to clean. Those places are:

• System Caches
• User Caches
• System Logs
• User Logs
• User Trash
• User Downloads folder.

There’s also the option to launch MacCleaner at login. I’d say that this isn’t really necessary because you probably won’t be cleaning your Mac every day, but I’d like an option to launch every two weeks to run some cleaning.

There are two versions of MacCleaning available. I used the Pro version for review purposes, but there’s also the free version. However, the free version only offers fast clean and real time disk monitoring – there is no option to eject mounted drives with one click, and the warning to be reminded when your hard drive space drops to a certain percentage is removed.

The requirements for MacCleaning are minimal – Mac OS X or later, 512 MB of RAM or more, and 2.8 MB of HD space available.

Get MacCleaning Free!

MacCleaning are currently offering their Pro version for just $4.99 – reduced from the normal price of $9.99. But guess what? We have 15 copies of MacCleaning to give away! The first 15 people who leave a comment on this post (with a legitimate email address) will receive the Pro version of MacCleaning. Contest ends Tuesday 27th December, 2011 11:59pm CST.

MacCleaning – Software to Clean Your Mac is a post from: Best Mac Software

We were recently made aware of a piece of Mac audio/video recording software named Jaksta. Jaksta makes it possible to record both streaming video and audio and play it any where you like. Not being huge power users for using audio/video on our Macs, we decided to give Jaksta a whirl anyway, and see how it did.

On the official Jaksta website is the following:

Jaksta for Mac is the easiest, most advanced streaming media recording technology ever created. Once monitoring, Jaksta will save video and audio files from thousands of web sites as they play on your Mac. These files can be transferred to other devices like your iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or burned to a CD or DVD disc, or used in other applications like iMovie.

The first thing we tried was to see how compatible the software was with Pandora. While we may not be huge video power users, we generally always have Pandora playing on our machines. Unfortunately, we experienced some issues with Jaksta when we started monitoring Pandora. It did record the songs, but didn’t record their names – while this isn’t too bad, if you’re using this software for a large amount of audio on Pandora, renaming those files is going to become pretty tiresome.

We then tried to see how Jaksta coped with YouTube – and we were impressed. Not only did it record the video we were watching, but it also correctly named the file and recorded it to a .mov file.

Picking a site at random, we wanted to see how it did with audio files displayed within content. The BBC often has great video files as well as content, so we played video files when looking through out the BBC’s website. Again, the video was recorded, named correctly  and saved as a .mov file.

For more information on Jaksta and to find out further information on its capabilities, read the user guide. You can order Jaksta for Mac for $49.95. If you’re an audio/video aficionado, it’s well worth the money.

Jaksta – Mac Recording Software is a post from: Best Mac Software

Wunderlist is free task management software for your Mac that allows you to organize and manage everything – projects, shopping lists, to-do items, you name it – Wunderlist can organize it. If that wasn’t awesome enough, Wunderlist will sync with just about any device you would want to use it on. I have it on my Mac at work, my Mac at home, and also on my iPhone. I haven’t had any issues with syncing and I’ve been using it for just over a week.

If you work in an environment where you need to collaborate – whether it’s a work project or freelance gig you’re doing, you can invite others such as your colleagues or friends to see your progress and to share with you.

Did I mention it was free?

I can’t believe I haven’t found out about Wunderlist until just very recently. Do yourself a favor, if you need any kind of task management software for your Mac, get Wunderlist. You can thank me later.

Wunderlist is a post from: Best Mac Software

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011 is a post from: Best Mac Software