Works quite well.. - morningcalm

The so called grudge is towards the lack of support and fact that with today's increased security they offered no way to activate boomerang unless it is through a full time open connection, which in most corporate environments will not be tolerated.

I will add that they did a partial refund, less $50.00. I would avoid this software and any support you may need.

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Sunday, October 14 2007 @ 05:54 PM PDT

Works quite well.. - rcfa

I had the same bad experience and concur that it's not acceptable that a data recovery product requires an online connection.
In a corporate environment you may be concerned about data security, in a private environment you may not even have a second computer from which you can boot and attach the troubled drive by means of FW in Target Drive mode or some other means (No you should NOT continue using the drive. The moment you delete something, you should essentially yank the plug and read-only remount the drive after booting from a different drive, since the longer the drive is actively used, the higher the chance that data is lost).
In either scenario online connections may not be possible or permitted.
(Try e.g. telling some three letter agency that they can only recover their files if their computers are connected to the internet, and they'll have some agent at your door with pistols and silencers attached to their barrels).
It is also unlikely, like the poster implies, that he indeed tested all the other potential competitors; if so, he'd quoted which products failed how and what Boomerang did differently.
For standard file types, Boomerang does not better, and not worse, than e.g. DataRescue II. Boomerang, like FileSalvage, has a learning feature to learn custom file types. Boomerang requires five examples, FileSalvage (I think) ten. That seems at first an advantage, since you may not have enough examples, but it turns out that with five examples Boomerang doesn't learn well enough, so you need more examples anyway.
I have close to twenty years worth of experience in computing with Mac OS X (aka NeXTSTEP/OpenStep), and over the years tested all sorts of products. I wanted to extend the tool set I carry on my emergency boot flash drive, particularly the learn custom file type feature was of interest, because that's the one thing the otherwise excellent DataRescue II does not have.
Neither DataRescue II nor FileSalvage will try to write/modify the drive that's troubled, and FileSalvage will also learn custom file types. These two programs together are at least as powerful as Boomerang, neither requires an on-line connection, and both together cost about the same as Boomerang alone!

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Monday, October 22 2007 @ 09:49 PM PDT