Expert's Rating
Pros
- Clean, inviting user interface offers easy access to a good set of tools
- Decent value for the retail price
- Good performance
- Able to save critical data from a presumed-dead SD card
Cons
- USB boot drive creation module struggled to perform
- Some grammatical errors within dialog boxes
- No trial version
Our Verdict
The inviting user interface offers easy access to a good set of tools – and at a decent price.
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There’s no shortage of good data recovery utilities available for the Mac, and while Wondershare Recoverit may not have the name recognition that seminal titles like Data Rescue or DiskWarrior might have, there’s still something good to be had here.
The software, which is centered around the usual modules that you might see in this kind of suite (Hard Drives and Locations and SD Card for file recovery, Enhanced Recovery and Corrupted Video Repair for video and photo restoration and System Crashed Computer and NAS and Linux for additional recovery features), is easy to download and install, assign permissions to, and begin to work with. It requires macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later to install
Wondershare Recoverit is variably priced, the package currently on offer and retailing for $79.99/£63.99 (usually $109.99/£93.97) for a one month license for unlimited recovery for two Macs, $89.99/£66.99 (usually $139.99/£113.97) for a one year license for unlimited recovery for two Macs, and $139.99/£118.97 (usually $169.99/£144.97) for a perpetual license for two Macs. The company also offers discounts for students, educators, and small and medium businesses. While no trial version exists, the free version allows for all of Wondershare Recoverit’s features to be used, although the program caps data recovery at 100 megabytes until an activation code has been entered.
A friendly home screen and user interface pulls you in, and the modules themselves generally work as well as expected. Data recovery for hard drives, locations, and SD cards is simple and reliable, Wondershare Recoverit executing both a quick scan and diving into a deep scan as well, sifting through its target volume sector, by sector, and doing the best it can with what’s there.
Choosing types of data to recover in Recoverit.
Foundry
The process is thorough, and the SD Card module was able to sift through a damaged 8GB SD card, pull some video data I needed and thought I’d lost for an upcoming video project, and deliver the data back cleanly to a recovery folder without issue. The video and photo repair modules work well with damaged files, and the remote-based utilities allow for network-based drives to be located or accessed manually to have data recovered from them, which could prove to be useful for network administrators.
Something of an unexpected bonus, the program can also save recovered data to a NAS drive or Google Drive, which proves to be a nice feature. Like similar applications, Wondershare Recoverit can be left on its own to chug through larger volumes, and ran well in the background even when digging through my 4TB Time Machine backup drive over the course of a day of testing.
Sifting through recovered data options in Wondershare Recoverit.
Foundry
In spite of its hardy ethos/work ethic towards data recovery and effective modules, the USB boot drive creation module fell flat on its face during testing, and it proved almost impossible to create a working USB thumb drive to boot my M2 Mac Studio from. Here, the module succeeded only once in writing boot code to an SD card, and failed to either correctly format or write to several USB flash drives and external SSD units, the program suggesting I try this function on a Mac running macOS 12 (Sierra) or older. Granted, Apple hasn’t made creating boot drives on recent Macs easy and this is becoming a trickier process for third-party software vendors, but it felt as if this feature was all but useless.
Other irritants included grammatical errors within dialog windows and Wondershare Recoverit asking you to send review feedback as to how you liked it after paying for the application indicates that the marketing department needs to take a break and let the QA and engineering teams resolve the issues involved with the USB boot drive creation module.
Should you buy Wondershare Recoverit?
The boot drive creation module issue aside, Wondershare Recoverit presents an excellent data recovery package at something of a wince-worthy, but not-unreasonable, price. $139.99/£118.97 may feel a little steep at first, but given that this buys a perpetual license for two Macs and the fact that there are education and SMB-related discounts helps this pill go down a bit easier.
Yes, an official free trial with access to all the bells and whistles would help, and it’d be nice to see everything the software’s capable of over the course of a week or a month, but what’s present helped pull some critical data from an SD card I thought was dead, easily backed my data up to Google Drive, and put something worthwhile on the table worthy of my consideration, and yours too.