MiniTool Data Recovery is a good program with a rich feature base, it offers some great technical readouts of the partitions you’re working with and customizable settings, but the look and feel of the program comes off as kludgy in terms of its user interface, as if a Windows product had been shoved towards OS X without a ton of clean up. Which is where we get to the heart of the matter.

This, combined with other small oddities, such as the program being unable to run an Undelete Recovery task on an HFS+ partition and requiring a full Damaged Partition Recovery function to be run in its place makes you scratch your head and think “OK, this is a Mac-specific utility, shouldn’t it be able to do that?” The program crashed during an initial scan on a 200GB-plus recovery effort, wherein after canceling the scan, it had to be force quit, the drive pulled and reloaded. While MiniTool Data Recovery packs some terrific features, there are still some caveats to contend with. This function works, but isn’t integrated into the main application, which fans of Data Rescue 4 might find annoying. Launch the MiniTool Boot Media Builder application, select a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive for it to use, give it a few minutes and you now have a bootable MiniTool Data Recovery drive that you can option-boot into if need be. Like several of its competitors, MiniTool Data Recovery both ships with a bootable CD as well as offers a utility to create a boot volume from a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive. Helpful if you’re working with a large volume that needs to be sifted through.

Like Data Rescue 4, MiniTool Data Recovery can save and work with previous scan states, allowing you to work with a partially completed scan at a later point in time. Activate either of these features and MiniTool Data Recovery will begin ferociously chugging away, locating everything it can find through the first scan of the volume, then allowing you to save whatever it can recover in categorized folders. The Undelete Recovery and Damaged Partition Recovery features work as you’d expect them to, especially after seeing these standard features on competing programs. This and the Digital Media Recovery feature stand out and it was fun to take an old SD card that had been laying around for years, plug it into my MacBook Pro, run the feature and dig through hundreds of old pictures I’d long since forgotten about.

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