Q: Best Data Recovery Software for OS X 10.4 Tiger?

It's tough to find any that works in 10.4 anymore, but tell us more on the exact nature/need of the recovery please.

Just so others know there is a parallel post to this in the Leopard forum.

Thanks, but actually they may be two different questions, since some things that work in one may not apply in the other!

We may never know.

Well, as I said in the other topic, the best recovery is not to need the software in the first place but to ensure you have a backup at all times.  I haven't needed recovery softare but from my reading of others' experiences you get your files back but they may be missing names so then you have fun sorting out 300,000 unnamed files.

Diskwarrior isn't recovery software as such, but is probably worth the investment if you have a spare $100.  Recovery software will, for example, help you recover a file you accidentally erased, or maybe even recover files from a drive that its truly bad.  DW repairs drive where errors are resulting from a bad listing of the files in the directory.  This can happen even under simple events such as a power failure.  DW can also be used as a maintenance tool.

Let's say you were having problems with a drive. We'd normally recommend trying DW first because it is nicer to sudddenly have the drive more or less back to pre-damage state.  Then if DW doesn't work we recommend trying to salvage files using a recovery tool.  DW won't recover deleted files though.

Recovery tools such as Datarescue or FileSalvage have trial modes to let them have a look at your drive and see if they can do anything about recovering files.

but they may be missing names so then you have fun sorting out 300,000 unnamed files

Limnos...Recently Stellar Phoenix Mac has released its new version v5.0 which can recover deleted files with their original file names. The software recovers deleted/lost files and folders, recovery of data from unmountable volumes and greater than 2 TB hard drive. I see many other new features very interesting in this version. Stellar Phoenix provides a free demo version which can be downloaded from their website. Also the software is compatible with OS X 10.4 Tiger,10.5 Leopard,10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion. I hope it helps !!

Great to hear, thanks for the report!

Yep you can retrieve data by yourself. There are programs to do that. For example Wondershare Data Recovery.

I used it few times.

But there is a sad news. I'm not sure but most of these programs work with NTFS and FAT32 files systems. I recently tried to find something that would work with ext4 but I was unsuccessful. So, because OS X is using HFS+ file system there could be problem with software. But I can't believe that they don't exist.

To sum up try to google "recovering HFS+ partition" or find program for recovering data that can work with HFS+ file system.

Good luck!