Recover Lost Data With Boomerang

photo credit: rhobinn

You know when you are having one of those days when nothing goes right. Yesterday was one of those days for me. Why Apple make’s it so easy to trash a RAID system using their Disk Utility application, I’ll never know, but that’s exactly what happened to me. In the blink of an eye my whole development system was wiped out. This is something I’m quite used to, before we had an amazingly expensive security system installed, our offices were robbed on a yearly basis, the targets off these crimes were always our development teams Macs, so I’m no stranger to lost work. The problem was I had a days work that was not backed up. After a frantic search my colleague suggested we try Boomerang Disk Recovery.

Using an external boot disk and a copy of Boomerang I was given the chance to recover all of my lost files. The only downside was that after the many hours waiting for it to scan the 1TB system I had to spend a couple of hundred dollers to get everything back. No problem though, a free license key is available that allows you to recover up to 1MB of data. Not much, but just enough to get the text files I needed. They offer variously low priced licenses that are restricted to a couple of megs, well worth the price for a one-off disk rescue. Oh, and it’s also available for Windows.

If anybody can recommend a freeware application that can recover a striped RAID system then I’d love to hear about it. Also, leave any shout-outs for applications, free or otherwise, that have saved you from an IT disaster in the comments.

Boomerang is available here for Mac and Windows.