There are few sensations worse than the knowledge of having erased important files involuntarily. I had never been through this situation, but recently I trashed and mistakenly deleted more than 200 photos while on the road. Being in another country, I couldn't make copies with Time Machine, so it was time to look for the last resort: a deleted file recovery app.
Works?
Go ahead, I am going to tell my personal experience and that in this type of problem there is no 100% reliabilityIn fact, the possibilities depend on a fundamental factor: the more we have used the Mac until we realize the deletion, the less possibilities we have. This happens because these types of apps work by recovering the bytes from the hard drive that are supposedly deleted but are not (the operating system simply marks them as deleted, but they are not really deleted unless we indicate it for security), so if we have used the hard disk it is possible that these bytes have been rewritten and therefore the files are unrecoverable.
The first step with Data Rescue 3 is to do a complete analysis that will take between 2 and 5 hours, depending on the size of your hard drive and if it is SSD or not. Once the application is complete, it will show us the recoverable files, and if luck is on your side, you will be able to recover the ones you are looking for. In my case it was simple since I used the app hours after deleting the files and emptying the trash, so I didn't make it too complicated.
The conclusion therefore is that for an extreme case it can give you a great joy, but always keep in mind that you can possibly recover them earlier with Time Machine if you have a backup made, and therefore you would save the cost of the app. There are others on the market (some cheaper than this one), but I don't know if they really work because I opted for the one that I obtained the best references, and fortunately it seems that I was right.