IsoBuster is intended to rescue files lost due to multiple causes, like accidental deletion, corrupted partition and virus attacks. The program supports practically any type of storage device, including optical discs, memory cards, USB drives and hard disks. Likewise, it can open an impressive list of image file extensions. It is good news that it supports not only Windows file systems (FAT and NTFS) but others as well.
The program does an excellent job of extracting contents from optical discs that are not in an optimum state. This includes playing audio from damaged analog CDs. Moreover, it has the advantage of supporting managed image files, which eliminates the necessity of extracting all the contents of a disc. The tool can also perform surface scans and mark defective blocks, which can later be filled manually.
All in all, IsoBuster provides an effective way to recover lost data irrespective of the original storage device and file system. In this respect, the program is more powerful than others. In my opinion, its main weakness is still its interface, which makes it inappropriate for inexperienced users. Moreover, I think that the tool would be complete if it allowed backing up partitions as ISO files, something that is possible with other data recoverers. The product is shareware and can be evaluated at no cost. However, some of its features are restricted, such as recovering files and viewing a sector.
v4.2 [Jun 23, 2018]
Changes / New:
- Rewrote the options dialog to look fresh and most importantly te be decluttered and intuitive again. Added to that, selecting a language or changing a font now changes all options' text immediately, so that you can see the effect.
- Added BDXL, M-Disc, UHD, Triple Layer (TL) and (Quadruple Layer) QL BD(RE) disc support.
- Ability to start IsoBuster 'idle' without any drive auto-selected (not the default but can be set in Options).
- Search (now by default) searches the entire region of the selected object, and not just the most relevant File System. For instance when a Session is selected, all tracks and file systems in those tracks will be searched and not just the most relevant file system in the most relevant track. The old way can still be turned on again in options.
- Work around for issue (most likely a buggy USB bridge driver) that causes less bytes to be transfered when reading raw (2352 bytes per block) on some systems.
- Ability to specify where the IBQ range ends, to influence filling gaps and where finishing at the end starts [Professional license].
- Implemented more flavours of Rimage Image files (*.rmg).
- Show text portions of certain Image files via an extra option in the main menu (e.g. for: *.cue, *.rmg, *.ewf, *.ccd).
- Rewrote the file export / report functionality to make it much faster, 10 times faster or more than before.
- Rewrote CUE file parsing to better deal with multi-file images and improve the overall functionality.
- Support reading in the first pregap on a CD (addresses -150 to -1), for instance with Sector View.
- The Edit window / Sector Viewer can be set (and will remember) its own font for both normal text and text that requires a fixed width font.
Improvements:
- Make sure the correct encoding is always used for XML, RTF and TXT in the Edit Window (TXT is now the default over RTF, using UTF8).
- Allow any extension, if more appropriate, when saving a file from the edit window.
- Improved search functionality engine for even faster and more accurate search results.
- Improved resolving of a path copied in the breadcrumb control / edit bar, to show the proper object(s).
- Do not display "Processing File-System" when mounting an Audio CD.
- Show better caption on the extraction dialog when cloning a drive or partition.
- Better detection of Atari DOS discs/images.
- Improve display of Mac 'Type' and 'Creator', in case of illegal (non-printable) characters.
- Implemented a more generic approach to store and use the ISO9660 / Joliet 'associated file'. The associated file is used as resource fork on Mac created discs but can in theory also exist on its own, for other implementations. We now treat it as a stream and also extract it as such.
- Added tags {%ASCII} and {%ANSI} to the file (encoding) export functionality.
- Added tags {%SUID} and {%PSUID} as unique object identifiers to the file export functionality.
- Added tags <%TSNSHT> and <%TSNSHRESET> to measure time of certain processes to the file export functionality.
- Added tags {
