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7 Preferences

The Preferences menu is available under the Data Rescue 3 menu bar at the top of the screen.

7.1 General

The General preferences includes settings for the interface, expert features, actions when quitting or saving, checking for updates, and resetting the warning dialogues.

Enable expert features will display a fourth section in the Preferences menu titled Expert. It will enable a variety of additional features to help recover from advanced data recovery scenarios. The expert features are designed for technicians or experienced computer users. See Expert Features for more information about expert features.

Disable animated user interface will turn off all animations within Data Rescue. Disabling the animated user interface is recommended if your computer has minimal memory or CPU speed.

Scan Complete Sound and Recovery Complete Sound allows you to specify a specific sound to play when the scan or recovery has finished.

Open Report on any error will open the Data Rescue Report window. Enabling this setting will allow you to immediately view any of the errors that are reported by the program.

Check for updates automatically will detect whether there are any new versions of the software available for download. This setting is enabled by default and will only check for updates if an internet connection is available.

Reset Warnings will reset all warning dialogs in Data Rescue where you can prevent the warnings from being displayed. For example, when quitting Data Rescue there is a confirmation dialog that shows which can be disabled from showing again. When you reset all warnings, that dialog will appear again.

7.2 Preview

The Preview preferences include settings for Data Rescue’s preview feature while viewing found files.

Show Preview above other windows will keep the Preview window displayed at all times and prevent the window from being hidden by other program windows.

Make Preview opaque will remove the translucent effect from the Preview window when enabled.

Auto-play audio and video files will immediately play any audio and video files when the preview window is opened for an audio or video file type.

Maximum auto-preview file size allows you to set the maximum size of a file that will be previewed automatically. By default it is 10MB, so any file greater than this will not generate a preview until one is manually requested.

Switch to Data view when Preview is not available requires Expert Mode to be enabled in General preferences. Enabling this setting will display the raw data for unrecognized file types in the Preview window.

7.3 Scan Engine

The Scan Engine preferences are additional settings for adjusting Data Rescue’s scan processes. Although there are many additional settings available, the default values should be fine for most situations and users, so changing these settings should not be necessary. The Scan Engine preferences are available to provide extra flexibility for expert users and in unusual circumstances where the default settings are not providing substantial results.

The Scan Engine preferences are organized hierarchically and displayed as a tree. Highlighting a portion of the tree in the left-hand window will cause any associated properties and values to appear in the right-hand window. If you highlight a property, a description is displayed in the small text window in the lower-right corner of the window. Properties with boolean (on/off) values are represented with a checkbox. Properties with numerical or text values are shown with a text field that can change the value. If a property is not editable, it will be shown in a gray font (dimmed). To edit a numerical or text value, double-click the current value, then type in the new value.

For properties which represent file sizes, you can input a new value using KB, MB, or GB size shortcuts. For example, to specify a size of 2 kilobytes, you can input either “2048” or “2KB”.

The most common need to access the Scan Engine preferences is to increase the maximum file size for a certain file type when you expect to find very large files of this type. For example, the default maximum size for most movie file types is 10GB. If you are looking for 25GB Quicktime movies, you will need to go into the preferences and increase the maximum file size to something larger than the biggest file you are looking for.

Modifying Maximum File Size
Modifying Maximum File Size

Reset Scan Engine Preferences will changes all the Scan Engine Preferences back to default settings. This is useful if you have previously changed any of the Scan Engine Preferences and would like to run based on the default configurations.

The various scan engine preferences are discussed in the following sections.

7.3.1 Cloning Preferences

The Cloning Preferences are for advanced users who have special needs with regards to cloning. The default cloning strategy should be adequate for almost all users and situations.

Data Rescue supports the following cloning strategies to help you accomplish this, which are described below starting with the simplest approach.

Straight Copy – This straightforward strategy starts at the beginning of the source media, and sequentially copies buffers of information to the destination media, one at a time, working straight through from start to end. If read errors are encountered, the algorithm just keeps going through them sequentially. If the disk should happen to have an area of errors close to the start of the hard drive, this means the algorithm may spend many hours trying to work through this area, without having copied much data.

Reverse Copy – This strategy is nearly the same as the straight copy, except that instead of working from the start of the media to the end, it works from the end of the media to the start. In the aforementioned case where there were errors at the beginning of the media, this strategy can help by allowing most of the data to be cloned before running into the problem area.

Bisect Copy – This strategy is influenced by the detection of errors found during the clone process. The clone will start at the beginning and clone until an error is encountered. Once an error is detected, the remaining space to clone is divided in half, then the clone process will continue from the second half of the remaining space. After the second half is cloned, the clone will return to the first half of the space to finish cloning. This process will repeat as more errors are detected on the hard drive.

Segment Copy – This is the default cloning strategy that is similar to bisect copy, but provides a more elaborate and efficient method to clone the media. The space of the hard drive is divided into 64 pieces, which are further subdivided if errors occur to ensure a clone of the healthy blocks of data while ignoring any bad blocks. If there are no errors, it will proceed exactly like the straight copy from the start to the end.

Most users should just use the default segment copy. The Reverse Copy method can be useful if the user knows that most of the errors are near the start of the media.

7.3.2 File Modules

The reconstructed files that are found by Deleted Files Scan or Deep Scan are based on individual file modules. Each file module is responsible for detecting one kind of file. Most file modules have a number of preference properties in common, such as enable, maximum file size, etc. The file modules are grouped by category based on the file type. For convenience, some of the properties for the individual file modules may be specified at the category level of the tree, which will allow all the file modules of the same category to use the same values. Individual file modules may still override the values from the category values.

File Modules Category
File Modules Category

7.3.2.1 Top Level File Modules Preferences

Enabled specifies whether a module is enabled to look for files during a scan. The default enabled value for this node is On. All the file modules underneath this point of the tree will be enabled, unless overridden at a lower level.

Number of filename digits controls how many numerical digits are used when generating names for files found by the file modules. For example, with the default setting of 5, the filenames will be generated as abc-00001, abc-00002, etc. Changing this setting to a value of 3 will generate file names as abc-001, abc-002, etc. The purpose of the leading zeros is so the Finder will list these in numerical order. Setting this value to 0 will have no leading zeroes added to the file name.

Maximum file size controls the maximum size that certain files can be. If a found file exceeds this value, the file will be ignored. Not all file modules implement a maximum file size.

7.3.2.2 Category Level Preferences

The category level preferences consist of the categories of file modules, such as Mail, Documents, Audio, etc. These categories are organized the same as the reconstructed file results. The preferences that are inherited from the top-level file modules preferences are still shown so you can see their values, but are not editable (dimmed).

Non Editable Preferences
Non Editable Preferences

A few categories have their own properties. For example, the Text category is disabled by default because its severe impact on performance and results. However, you may choose to enable the Text category if you want to scan for a particularly important text document that is not recovered by any other file module.

Other examples of unique preferences include Maximum consec bad chars for Text file modules to help detect the end of a file properly and Minimum image dimensions for Video and Images.

7.3.2.3 File Module Preferences

The lowest subcategory displays preferences for the individual file modules. The properties which are listed in green are preferences which are using a value from a higher place in the tree.

7.4 Recovery Preferences

Bad file color will add a label color of your choice to any files detected by Data Rescue that were potentially recovered as bad. The color label helps organize files when viewing them through the Finder. These bad files may be attributed to incomplete file patterns or incorrect allocation block layouts.

Change ownership will change the file and folder ownership for all recovered files to the user running Data Rescue. This is helpful if the original hard drive was experiencing file ownership problems.

Clear lock will force change any lock bits when recovering files or folders when this preference is enabled. This will allow any files or folders that were originally locked on the problem drive to be accessed, renamed, or deleted by the user.

Copy buffer size preference specifies the size of the buffer to use for copy operations, such as recovering files. A larger buffer size will improve the speed of the recovery of files, but will use more memory.

Make items visible will change any invisible files to be visible when they are recovered.

Omit empty files will ignore displaying any files that are indicated to have no data when enabled.

Permissions promotion will change permissions of any recovered files to “Read and Write” based on the selected preference.

7.5 Scanning Preferences

Keep bad files will keep all found files to be displayed in the scan results, even if they appear to have bad contents or format.

Maximum files/folders preference is used during scanning when Data Rescue has to create its own folders using catalog files, such as the Orphans Folder within the Found Files results. When the number of files would exceed the value set in this preference, Data Rescue will create a new folder. The default is 1000 files per folder.

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