I continue to be surprised by the need for a hard drive utility such as Prosoft’s Drive Genius 3. I probably shouldn’t be. Apple’s Disk Utility included with Mac OS X is largely useless beyond the most basic tasks, and all the OS optimizing in the world isn’t going to prevent bugs and beach balls from occasionally popping up. So, a disk utility is a given. And although it’s not given that you should choose Drive Genius, it’s getting closer.

Data Rescue 3 is an application meant to recover and find data on hard drives regardless of how messed up or corrupted they may be. It can be used to find recently deleted files as well as files that were simply lost, and it promises to be the “safest, most powerful software for data recovery.” In my experience, I found it works pretty well, and the developers put quite a bit of work into their user interface.