I rescued files from an external drive that was trashed by spotlight. (Do get "spotless" if you use bigger external drives)

I first bought TechTool, because I thought I would get more functionality then just a file recovery weith that purchase. However, TT file discovery is plain sucks. It has a cumbersome method of retrieving files (no multiselection of files, all files go into a "rescued items" folder and you need to re-sort them after retrieval...) plus it is very buggy. The list of recoverable files gets burgorzed when you open and close folders, making it impossible to reach all files you want once you made the mistake and opened a folder. I successfully recovered 3 files, then TT didnt react anymore. It had taken 12 or 13 hours for TT to create the list of recoverable files, now I was to do it again. NO THANKS!

Now I tried DR II, and this one really is wonderful.
1) it is easy to understand.
2) it has not one but 3 different scan methods (donno what the difference is, but the "unknown" folder that DR offers worked perfectly for me.)
3) Although 3 scan methods are used and not one, it took only 4.5 hours to scan a 500GB drive! Less than half the time TT needs for one inferior scan method! DR discovered many more files than TT, including system files.
3) it is robust. DR failed on some of my files and (just as TT) stopped doing anything senseful. But it did never crash. I could always stop the action and select other files to recover.

All in all, DR is the way to go for file recovery. If your drive is OK but your directory structure or whatever got corrupted a little, you may also try DiskWarrior (or Drive Genius?) instead of a recovery util.