MediaRECOVER for Mac

User Reviews

• Digital photographer? You need this!

  James GarvinOctober 9, 2010

  Pros

  Prevents that sinking feeling from turning to despair when you realize the wedding photos on that corrupted memory card may be toast. The joy of recovery! Requires an admin password to use, so non-admin users can't erase your hard drive or cards.

  Cons

  Can't target specific file types to eliminate cluttered results on non-photo devices. Boot drive shows up by default in the Select Volume category of Tools. Online Help disconnected in this version. Not a current shipping product with Smith Micro.

  Summary

  Despite its current shortcomings, when the unexpected happens to a drive or memory card, this can significantly lower your blood pressure and eliminate notions of seppuku. I have used it on more than one occasion to recover files I thought were gone forever. I only wish I'd had it the very first time I experienced a corrupted memory card in my digital camera. If you do NOTHING else to the card before running this utility, chances are you will recover 100% of the photos and certain document files on the card at the time of corruption. They will have generic sequence numbers, not the names originally assigned to them, but you will have the files.

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• Works fine for me

  lenwhyteSeptember 14, 2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Well some folks obviously having trouble, but I just used my copy of Mediarecover to obtain an AVI file from a formatted CF card. Worked a treat! Perhaps it was because I hadn't used the card since formatting it, but whatever, I'm a happy camper!

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• Avoid this software if you use a Mac

  kbreyesApril 11, 2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I had a CF with corrupt jpegs and CR2 files. I got the jpegs back with exif untrasher, but I wanted the RAW files, too. So I bought this. What a piece of crap. It took four minutes to recover exactly the same corrupt files I dragged in through iView. In other words, I got nothing. I then went Tools which told me to use my Disk Utility to erase the card and then try again. Well, I erased it and the scan produced NOTHING. Now I want my $29 back. This is a scam.

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• Worked very well for me

  Beren PApril 5, 2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I had a CF card erased with hundreds of CR2 (Canon RAW) image files. MediaRecover successfully recovered all images perfectly. I couldn't be happier with it.

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• No way to get Demo to work correctly

  MacTiBookAugust 22, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I have tried twice with two separate downloads to get a SD card recovered. All I got was a full set of previews but I could not download one single file. I have deleted the program and did it with FlashRestore on the first attempt. Mark

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• It's saved my bacon twice now.

  David H DennisJune 15, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />When you take pictures with your expensive digital camera, and your media reader scrambles them, the first reaction is a feeling of blind panic. This is not a brainy scheme. Well, this is the little program that could. It got into the disk and recovered all my images, 100%. And in my book, that's good enough to give it a great review. If you have pictures you need to save, this will do the job with a minimum of fuss or bother. You can preview the pictures while they are being extracted, which is very reassuring when you have a lot of images to save. Instead of showing the images one by one as they are recovered, MediaRecover lets you view them by clicking on their file names. This lets you look at individual images for a longer time, but it would be cool to watch them pop up one by one. I suppose I should reassure people that it really doesn't slow down my computer at all. Well, um, my computer is a dual processor 2ghz G5 with 3.5gb RAM, so I suppose the remarkable thing would be if it DID slow things down. I'm sure the program really does grind a 867ghz G4 to a halt, but then again, pretty much any data recovery program I've ever used would do that. It does take a long time to recover images, but that's probably par for the course, and since it does the job, it's really unimportant. Someone else pointed out that you can get full-fledged disk utilities for only a bit more money than Media Recover. This is true, but I don't think they would successfully fix garbled image files. I've seen them undelete but I've never seen one fix a corrupted application file. I would argue that in my experience, this is a completely different animal to a more standard disk maintenance program. I can't comment on support because I didn't need it. This program isn't that feature-rich, but you don't really need features for this kind of program. You just need it to work. It does.

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• It's saved my bacon twice now.

  David H DennisJune 15, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />When you take pictures with your expensive digital camera, and your media reader scrambles them, the first reaction is a feeling of blind panic. This is not a brainy scheme. Well, this is the little program that could. It got into the disk and recovered all my images, 100%. And in my book, that's good enough to give it a great review. If you have pictures you need to save, this will do the job with a minimum of fuss or bother. You can preview the pictures while they are being extracted, which is very reassuring when you have a lot of images to save. Instead of showing the images one by one as they are recovered, MediaRecover lets you view them by clicking on their file names. This lets you look at individual images for a longer time, but it would be cool to watch them pop up one by one. I suppose I should reassure people that it really doesn't slow down my computer at all. Well, um, my computer is a dual processor 2ghz G5 with 3.5gb RAM, so I suppose the remarkable thing would be if it DID slow things down. I'm sure the program really does grind a 867ghz G4 to a halt, but then again, pretty much any data recovery program I've ever used would do that. It does take a long time to recover images, but that's probably par for the course, and since it does the job, it's really unimportant. Someone else pointed out that you can get full-fledged disk utilities for only a bit more money than Media Recover. This is true, but I don't think they would successfully fix garbled image files. I've seen them undelete but I've never seen one fix a corrupted application file. I would argue that in my experience, this is a completely different animal to a more standard disk maintenance program. I can't comment on support because I didn't need it. This program isn't that feature-rich, but you don't really need features for this kind of program. You just need it to work. It does.

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• Demo seems to work OK but...

  nreubenFebruary 15, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Tried out the demo - found deleted and undeleted jpeg files on a 512mb CF card. I was able to preview the files visually, which is a handy feature. the demo recovers a single file, which looked OK. The app crashed on exit on 10.3.2. There was also a minor bug in scrolling the preview file list with the cursor keys - the preview would not update until the mouse was clicked on a specific file - painful if there are a lot of images. The real question is whether to spend $30 on a utility for just media files, or invest in a full up disk recovery utility for around $100, with additional features and complexity...Overall this program is easy to use and I like the preview, but not sure about the value....

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