iBeesoft Data Recovery review | Macworld

Price When Reviewed

Personal License: $59.95; Lifetime License for $129.95

Best Prices Today: iBeesoft Data Recovery for Mac

Sometimes, a company can offer a good product, but it falters when its departments fall out of sync. This is the case with iBeesoft’s Data Recovery for Mac, which functions as a data recovery and backup application and also includes a video repair utility for the AV nerds out there. The application, which requires Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later to install and run, starts at $59.95 (approx £46) for a year’s subscription for one Mac or Windows PC for a Personal License and scales up, depending on the number of licenses. There’s also a Lifetime License for $129.95 (approx £100) that works on two Macs. Data Recovery for Mac is also available for free, although the free version features a 500MB limit as to the amount of data that can be recovered, along with free 24/7 tech support and free lifetime upgrades.

The software, which downloads and installs easily, is based around several modules (Storage Devices, Crashed Mac Recovery, Video Repair, File Backup, and Search Records), the Storage Devices module acting as the application’s data recovery bread and butter. Once you’ve assigned full disk access to the application, you’re free to use the module to scan through your list of mounted drives, the software looking for deleted files, reconstructing and recovering everything it can, and allowing you to designate a location to save them to. This is accompanied by a user-friendly interface and helpful file categorizations, such as All Types, Pictures, Documents, Audio, Video, Emails, Archives, Others, and Unsaved Documents, and it’s easy to select specific files or all files for a given recovery to an external volume once a scan is complete.

To its credit, Data Recovery for Mac’s other modules are fun to work with, and the Video Repair module allows you to drag and drop old video clips and upgrade their quality before exporting them. The Backup module allows you to specify files, folders, or an entire volume and back up a copy as a .dmg file, which can be easily restored later, both with Data Recovery for Mac or with macOS itself. The modules feature a good level of customization and configuration, and it’s simple to pick and choose the specific files or file types that you want to recover. Finally, the Search Records module offers a handy array of logs that you can pick up and work with, resuming a previous search and recovery as needed.

See how this app compares to other Data Recovery for Mac solutions we have tested.

While this all seems to be headed in the right direction, there are some elements to sort out. The Crashed Mac module is designed to offer an easily downloadable .dmg file to create a boot drive to use as an emergency disk to help recover data to an external hard drive, but the web server that hosted the file not working so the feature couldn’t be tested. This comes as an outright punch in the nose, and you’d think that a credible software company with over a dozen products in its portfolio would have planned for this contingency, the user being routed to an alternate server.

Several gaffes, generally on the company’s side of things, also serve as thorns in the side. Spelling and grammatical errors abound on the company’s website, and in one instance, the stated minimum operating system indicated that the user needed Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or later to run Data Recovery for Mac, when the actual minimum required operating system was Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later.

The lack of a demo period for the software seems odd, and the company offers a vague list of criteria as to what qualifies for its 60-day money-back guarantee, something that I think a trial period would readily address.

Should you buy iBeesoft’s Data Recovery for Mac

What’s present in iBeesoft’s Data Recovery for Mac is useful, but the overall execution feels sloppy, as if the departments within the company weren’t in sync with each other and their attention was divided between an array of projects. The intention is there, but from a downed file server that made one module impossible to test to conflicting information on the website, it feels as if iBeesoft could be doing a better job with this.

Yes, the company was quick to respond to technical questions via email and offered good help and tutorial materials via the application and the company website, but the other shortcomings hurt what could be a great application with a moderate amount of work and a clear corporate plan.

Data Recovery for Mac is worth a look, and it hones in on its core features well, but if its parent company can’t deliver on what’s been promised, then its competitors might be that much more deserving of your attention.