Quickly change image quality, batch convert and resize your digital pictures with Photo Transformer

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Photo Transformer

Prosoft has recently released another clever App Store product called Photo Transformer.
This handy app can quickly convert common image types to .png , .jpg and .tiff formats as well as reduce photo quality. Photo Transformer provides fast, easy and automatic categorization of images by type, date, size, etc. The categories can be used to easily find the images you are looking for and then process them in a variety of different ways.

Photo Transformer can be extremely useful when you need to quickly convert Raw images to jpegs or simply shrink image sizes down by reducing the image quality for the web. For more information click this link.

Let me show you how easy it is to select a folder of images and reduce the quality of them to be uploaded to the web or import them into iPhoto in seconds.

Click the Photo Transformer icon to watch the video.

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DIY Data Recovery for your Mac using Data Rescue 3

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Mac screen of death

In the last few years external drives have become increasingly affordable and an convenient way to backup data and store all sorts of types media files. What happens when your external drive is no longer seen on your desktop or within finder on your Mac? Or, you format the wrong drive inadvertently ?

We recommend using Data Rescue 3 and try a quick scan or deep scan on the device. Data Rescue 3 can find files that your operating system may not see when dealing with a corrupted or formatted drive. Data Rescue 3 is an cost effective way to recover your data in a truly “DIY” method. Our new “How-to Guides” cover all of the basics for most scenario’s to ensure you are successful.

Feel free to call us at 1-877-477-6763 to speak with someone live Monday through Friday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm PST.

This link is all you need to get started with the best data recovery application for the Mac.

If you need help or have any pre-sales questions, give our quality Support team located in Livermore,CA a call at 925-426-6306 from 7:00am-5:00pm Monday through Friday PST.

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Drive Genius 3 How-to Guides

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Mike Fiato

DIY How-to-Guides

Drive Genius 3 is a great way to maintain, optimize and manage your Mac storage devices with step by step how-to guides. Recently Prosoft has added how-to guides for for many Drive Genius 3 features. Theses features include live defrag, repartition (resizing volumes) , duplicate (clone) and scanning for bad blocks. These new how-to’s with screen shots simplify many features for non-techies to use with ease and confidence.Historically hard drive utilities are not novice friendly and we understand this. This is why Prosoft Engineering wants to make it easier for you with these DIY how-to guides and not just point you towards the manual. If you do have questions you can always call us Monday thru Friday 7:00am – 5:00pm PST. Our support team is ready to assist you every steps of the way if needed.

Drive Genius 3 Product Info Page

Live Defragmentation

Duplicate your Hard Drive

Initialize

Scanning / Sparing Bad Blocks

Resizing your Hard Drive

Create a Lion Startup Disk

Creating a Bootable Clone

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Recovering files from optical and magnetic media using Data Rescue 3

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Optical and Magnetic Media Recovery

Data Rescue 3 has and can be used to recover data from a floppy disk or CD/DVD media in certain cases. We do not officially support this, however if your able to see your files by using the demo and our steps below to preview or recover a sample file give it a shot.

A floppy disc can not be directly scanned by Data Rescue 3. However if your able to clone the contents of a flash or SD drive to another device or make a .dmg file , it can be scanned afterwards. You can do this with a external floppy drive and disk utility. Apple’s Disk Utility can make a .dmg file out of the floppy disk.
For more info on creating a disk image from a drive, visit Apple Support document

Afterwards scan the .dmg file with Data Rescue and 3 follow the steps below,

1) Go to the “Data Rescue 3″ menu at the top of the screen and select “Preferences”.
2) Click on the check box for “Enable Expert Features”, then close the Preferences window.
3) Ensure you are within the “Detail View” for Step 1 to see the list of devices. If you are in Arena View (with the animated interface) click on the “Detail View” on the bottom left corner to change views.
4) Go to the Expert Menu at the top of the screen and select “Add file to scan…”. This will display an “Open” prompt for you to select a file.
5) Select the file in the prompt and click “Open”.
6) You will notice the file will appear in the “Select a Drive/Volume” list. You may proceed with your scan of the file from there.

Data Rescue is capable of scanning CD/DVD media based on file patterns to rebuild any common file types it detects, such as JPEG, MP3 Audio, and Word Doc. However, Data Rescue 3 does not display the CD/DVD media as a device to scan by default. You may enable the selection of CD/DVD’s by enabling these special features within the Demo of Data Rescue 3.
Steps on enabling all devices:
1) Go to the “Data Rescue 3″ menu at the top of the screen and select “Preferences”.
2) In the “General” tab, click on the click on the “Enable Expert Features” check box to turn on this feature.
3) Select the “Scan Engine” tab. Hold the “Control” key and click on the category titled “Scanning”.
4) On the right side of the list, enable the check box titled “Show all devs”, then close the Preferences. (Please note if the right side of the list does not contain “Show all devs”, highlight a different category temporarily, then hold the “Control” control key and click on the “Scanning” Category once again).
5) Close the “Preferences” window.
6) Refresh the hard drive list by going to the “Expert” menu at the top of the screen and select
“Refresh Volume List”.

Once the list is refreshed, the CD/DVD media will be available to scan. From here, you may try the demo to scan the media with a Deep Scan, and any files found will be listed within the “/Reconstructed Files/” folder to review. Simply highlight any files of interest and click on the “Preview” button to see if the files display properly. If it provides you with the results you are looking for, you may purchase the full version of Data Rescue 3 here to continue with your recovery.

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Hard Drive shortages continue and prices continue to rise.

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Hard drive prices continue to go up

I am updating my hard drive shortage blog from the beginning of the month. It appears the shortage continues and hard drive manufactures want to lock in one year pricing based on current global shortages. This may lead to PC makers to turn to the gray markets to attempt to stay on par with current orders and to stay competitive.

Reports found on all of the major tech sites suggests that large OEM’s are scrambling to buy quantities of gray market hard drives to fulfill present and future orders. The down side of this is that gray market drives may not be as good of quality in certain cases and not carry the full warranty as one would expect.

Here is how the gray market works. A company makes a certain product for sale within a certain country; say the U.S. as an example. The same company also manufactures the exact product, intending to sell them in other countries. Someone buys one these gray market products outside the U.S. and then imports them back into the United Sates for sale. Here is where it may get sticky. The original company may not want to provide warranty coverage or support because they weren’t intended for sale here in the U.S. to begin with. The end result is your only recourse may be the vendor you bought it from and that is typically a 30 day or less period.

If your in the market for a new PC you may consider purchasing an additional internal hard drive from a legitimate source like OWC for future storage needs. Reports suggest that HD pricing will rise and be unstable for some time throughout 2012. Buying gray market drives from sources for the lowest possible price could be risky and always read and review the return, warranty and support policies carefully.

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Independent application volume control and headphone optimization

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Hear greatly improves sound quality in movies and music throughout all of your Mac OS X applications. Hear utilizes the hardware already in your computer and combines that with state of the art DSP programming to give you additional bass, spatialization, 3D surround enhancements of any sound played through your Mac.
A handy feature that Hear controls is independent application audio output. This especially useful when you have multiple applications open but want o independently control say iTunes but limit iChat or Mail audio notifications and alerts.
To do this simply switch to the mixer tab and you can adjust a specific applications volume control. In the screen shot below the iChat and Mail apps are drastically lowered compared to iTunes. This gives the user control to hear the song or movie but minimize alerts to lower levels.

Hear Mixer Window

When your not using stereo speakers and switch to headphones you can select the mixer tab to tune the Hear for headphone use on the fly. Hear provides a wide variety of presets for you to choose from, genres include everything from Dance music to Movie Trailers. You can also select the type of environment the sound will be played in.

Hear ships with default presets for use with speakers or headphones. In each of the preset categories, presets intended for use with speakers are suffixed with ‘-S’. Presets intended for use with headphones are suffixed with ‘-H’.

Hear pre-sets

Try Hear for FREE for 30 Days.

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Don’t take any chances…back up in 2012.

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Mike Fiato

Priceless Family Photos

As we enter the New Year, you may have taken many family photos and movies over the holiday season. This is why its a great time to backup those images and movies so that there is an additional copy on a different drive. The reason I say this is, its a common misconception that if you store your files on a external or secondary drive, they are the backups. Well, this is true if your files happen to be on your Mac’s hard drive and the backup drive. However, if you have simply transferred your pictures and movies from your camera straight to your backup drive it is not the case.

The definition of the backup is, its the secondary copy. The source which is your SD or CF media on your camera is constantly reused and rewritten to. This is why transferring your images from your camera to your internal Mac HD drive is very important on a consistent basis. Once this is done, running a Time Machine backup or Data Backup 3 completes the process and your files are now on two separate drives.

You can test drive Data Backup 3 today for free and were even throwing in a “ How to Guide “ to create a bootable clone backup. This is a great way to backup all your files , apps and complete operating system. This type of backup is bootable and may be bootable on a similar Mac as well. This makes Data Backup 3 very versatile and a great alternative to Time Machine.

You can find the Data Backup 3 demo link and steps on to make a bootable clone from this link: http://www.prosofteng.com/support/drivegenius3-bootable-clone.php

Happy New Year!

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Using fileIQ for new and updated file types

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Mike Fiato

FileIQ will help Data Rescue 3 learn to file types to recover

A little known feature within Data Rescue 3’s toolbox is called “ fileIQ “.
This feature can be extremely useful when scanning for deleted files or reformatted drives.

If Data Rescue does not recognize the file type you are trying to recover, FileIQ will help Data Rescue to learn new file types. Data Rescue will analyze any good working file samples and detect any file patterns to help find missing files of that file type. FileIQ will work for many, but not all types of files. However, Data Rescue will tell you if your sample files are likely to work or not, and there is nothing to lose by trying.

To utilize File IQ, please follow these steps:

1) In step 2, click on File IQ.
2) Click on the + icon to add file samples.
3) Choose any at least 5 files of the same file type.
4) Click on Open to add the files into the list.
5) Click on Save. The filetype will be added to the “Learned Types” list.
6) Click on “Back” and select Deep or Deleted File scan to help you search for files of your new file module.

Any files found with the new file module will be listed under the folder “/Reconstructed Files/User Defined/”. Review the information listed in here and select any of the files you wish to recover. More information regarding File IQ can be found in the manual.

More info can be found on Data Rescue 3 from our website :
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

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Initializing a drive using Drive Genius 3

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Mike Fiato

Drive Genius 3‘s initialize feature can prepare a disk that is not been previously formatted or erase an existing volume before Installing a version of Mac OSX on it. Most hard drives are already pre-formatted, however, many hard drives are not ready for Mac use.

Additionally, you can use Initialize to format SD & CF media cards as well. The Initialize feature is very straight forward and easy to use. If your not familiar with Apple’s Disk Utility , this can simplify the process for you in a snap.
Follow the steps to format your drive properly for an Intel based Mac.

1.  Launch Drive Genius 3.
2.  Click the Initialize icon from the arena menu or from the drop-down menu on the top right.

Initialize Window

3.  Select the drive you want to initialize. (format)
4.  Choose the GUID Partition Table option.
5.  Type in “ Mac HD Clone “ and click the “ Start “ button.

6.  Confirm you have chosen the correct drive and options before clicking “ Initialize “.

7.  Once completed Time Machine will prompt you to use the drive as a Backup Disk .You can either choose to either use or do not use based on your use for the drive.

Warning Message

Clone Window

Initialize Window

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New Years Resolution , take better care of your Mac

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Mike Fiato

Take better care of my Mac with Drive Genius 3


Throughout the year we take our laptops and storage devices almost everywhere we go. But how many of us actually back up them up on a regular basis, scan for bad blocks or even defrag your drives ? 2012 is around the corner and and the new year is always a good time to start a new resolution. This may be easier than you think. Prosoft Engineering has a solution to keep your Mac running in tip-top shape and monitor all your drives for issues before they develop into serious problems. Drive Genius 3’s feature “ Drive Pulse “ can monitor connected external drives and your internal boot drive. Purchasing Drive Genius 3 for 2012 ensures that your keep all your storage devices backed up up with the “ Duplicate “ tool and “ Defragment’d “ with the “ Defrag “ and error free with the “ Repair” tool.

To make your resolution just a little bit easier , were throwing some DIY how to guide’s for the feature’s mentioned. Now , there no reason you cant maintain, optimize, repair and defrag all of your Mac storage devices just like the Apple Genius Bar does.

Live Defrag
 Duplicate
Scan Bad Blocks

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