Skavenjer - 1.2

1. Skavenjer sounds like a very useful app, so I d/l'ed it ("This product is designed to run on the following operating systems: Mac OS X 10.5 Intel), and it unzipped, launched, and ran on my decidedly NON-Intel iBook G4.

2. Skavenjer runs from "root," which gives it an advantage over the other data recovery apps I've seen, all of which must be run from a different volume.

3. Skavenjer's trial mode searches only the first 5% of your HD, which makes evaluating it a dicey issue, since there's no way of knowing whether what you're searching for resides in that portion of your HD. (I'll guess that the first 5% of an HD is filled with system files, doesn't have much, if any, space to be written to, and that the chances of finding any lost data residing there are between slim and none. [Please correct me if that's wrong.])

4. To be diligent, I logged in as root, created a miniscule TextEdit document, trashed it, and began a search for a term included in the doc's text.

Since there's no mention made anywhere of how long a search ought take (Is a guess that a scan of "the surface of your computer's hard disk for the search term you specify" will take on the order of the same amount of time as a surface scan reasonable?), I quit the app before mine completed, unwilling to invest the time that looked to be necessary to complete a search I considered to be in all likelihood futile, but not before discovering more than 20 THOUSAND error messages in Console, i.e. "There was an error: block 0, blocksize 262144, total blocks 0," that suggest a snag that was not reported by the app itself.

5. Neither on Skavenger's VT page or website, nor within the app itself is a potential purchaser advised either how much the app costs or how to go about registering it.

All in all, I'd say that the guys at Bleecker Street Solutions ought to spend more time reconsidering the ins, outs, details, and documentation of their app.