recover

iTunes is the default program for managing all of your Apple devices, but it's certainly not the be-all and end-all for managing your iPhone or iPod content. CopyTrans promises an easy, smart, safe way to transfer and back up your Apple device content, and it delivers.

To ensure a positive user experience, CopyTrans offers help from the get-go with a pop-up window that gives you links to its online User Guides, Getting Started Guide, and video demo. But thanks to its simple but functional user interface, we really didn't need the documentation. With our iPhone 4 plugged into … Read more

TestDisk and PhotoRec from CG Security are freeware utilities bundled together in one portable download. TestDisk is a simple but powerful tool for analyzing and recovering disk partitions, including some unusual selections such as Xbox and Mac partitions. PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files from your digital camera's memory or any similar memory device. It can handle most memory types, including USB, CompactFlash, MMC, and SmartMedia as well as optical disks and your hard drives. Though PhotoRec and TestDisk are bundled, they're separate utilities with separate executables.

PhotoRec is designed to be totally safe to use, and … Read more

When Mail in OS X detects a problem with an e-mail message, it may attempt to recover the message in a special mailbox called "Recovered Messages"; however, sometimes this recovery process may hit a snag and result in multiples of the same message being recovered. This issue can sometimes result in other problems, including Mail not being able to get new mail, and also having the hard drive fill up and lead to slowdowns and other problems if the message has a large attachment associated with it.

The recovered message may be a previously sent message, or even … Read more

While working with a client today, I uncovered a handy tip that could save you an extremely large amount of hard drive space on your Mac. My client had just purchased a new 13-inch MacBook Pro and had her information transferred from her old machine.

Shortly thereafter she began receiving error messages that her startup disk was full and that she needed to delete files on her machine in order to continue using it.

The first place I looked for extraneous files was in media folders. Typically, deleting video and high-resolution photo files will give the quickest relief to a … Read more

Advanced Excel Repair is a simple but powerful tool for recovering and repairing damaged or corrupted Excel spreadsheets. It's designed for businesses and others who rely on Excel, for whom a lost or damaged file can be either a nuisance or a catastrophe.

Advanced Excel Repair has a simple, attractive dialog-based interface with tabs for Repair, Batch Repair, and Preferences, although Preferences covers nothing more than selecting a directory for temporary files and the internal process buffer size. The default tab, Repair, is dominated by a log display, a progress bar, and a Start Repair button, which offers options … Read more

Drive Genius is a hard-working hard-drive utility from longtime Mac developers Prosoft Engineering, with the honorable distinction of being employed at the Apple Store Genius Bar as part of their ProCare Yearly Tune Up service.

The interface of Drive Genius shares some similarities with that of its data-recovery sister program Data Rescue: you navigate through a 3D "tool arena," a sort of virtual lazy Susan of hard-drive tasks that's fast and fluid enough to not be annoying (and it's actually kind of fun). You choose from six primary tasks, Information (with detailed readouts on S.M.… Read more

There may be times when you start up your system that the trash will have a folder called "Recovered Files" in it, and it may contain a number of oddly named files that might contain garbled data or could be 0KB in size.

The Recovered Files folder contains temporary files that were used by applications and system processes, which were not properly released and discarded when the application was terminated. This can happen if a program unexpectedly quits, or more commonly if the system crashes in the middle of your work.

The next time the system boots after … Read more

Passwords are perhaps the weakest links in the cyber-security chain; if they're complex enough to be secure, you probably won't be able to remember them. Add the fact that every other site seems to require a password, and it's easy to see why far too many people end up using one or two simple passwords that are easy to remember, and easy to crack, too. You can write your passwords down on a piece of paper that you can look for and fail to find when you need it, or you can download and install G&… Read more

As you probably suspect, Windows doesn't show you everything that's on your hard drive. However, Disk Investigator does. It's a free, compact tool that searches your hard drives and displays everything that's on them, bypassing your operating system and reading the raw data, sector by sector. With it, you can examine raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors, which is especially useful when you're reusing a disk or upgrading your OS. You can also use it to verify the effectiveness of disk-cleaning utilities and even recover deleted files and lost data, in many cases.

This … Read more