Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

thanks for the help!

The R-TT site is working now.

Well. There are several issues mixed here. Let's deal with it in line.
1. I need to know which hardware you use for your FreeNAS server. Until that I cannot say much about whether or not a startup R-TT product will run on it. Please also note that you will not be able to install R-Studio on your FreeNAS server.

2. Apparently you confused two products - R-Studio Emergency and R-Studio Agent Emergency.
R-Studio Agent Emergency is intended for network data recovery. Under this process, you install R-Studio on your host computer and start the remote computer (from which you want to recover the files) using R-Studio Agent Emergency. Then you establish connection between the two computers and get the access to the remote computer from the host one.
R-Studio Emergency is a startup version of R-Studio. It contains a bootable OS kernel (Linux-based) and R-Studio. You don't need to establish any network connections with the host computer, and you even cannot do that. R-Studio and R-Studio Emergency cannot work together. But R-Studio Emergency has all features of R-Studio, and you can recover data from it.
See http://www.r-tt.com//File_Recovery_FAQ.shtml#q53 .
So, I recommend you to use R-Studio Emergency.

3. You need to have some place to store the recovered files. You may connect a USB hard drive to your FreeNAS server and save the files on it. If you don't have large files (2+GB), I recommend you to format the USB disk to FAT32 to be able both to write files to the disk from R-Studio Emergency and read them on your Mac systems. If some files are larger, better use NTFS. See this FAQ topics for details (it tells about R-Drive Image startup version, but the same is correct for R-Studio Emergency, too): http://www.r-tt.com//Drive_Imaging_Backup_FAQ.shtml#q31.
Another options is to use a network drive.

4. Licensing and other staff. if you buy an R-Studio for Mac, you will also receive an R-Studio Emergency. The only thing you should remember is that you need to obtain the hardware activation code for your FreeNAS server hardware. And remember: you can try before buy. See this for details: http://forum.r-tt.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=289 . All this is correct for R-Studio Emergency, too.

The sales pages are all DOWN, like most of the R-TT site. It wouldn't matter, though, because I cannot tell from the info whether the Mac version works over a network or not.

I have downloaded it, and the "connect to remote" option is there, but it never connects to the emergency demo CD and the emergency demo CD never connects to the Mac R-Studio app. Perhaps this is a limitation of the demo, perhaps not. I can't find anything in the manuals that says either way.

Here is the situation, exactly:

I have a FreeNAS server with a software RAID5 array that needs to be recovered. I can boot from the Emergency demo CD (NOT the Agent CD DEMO), and I can get the GUI to scan the drives in question and some files to show up. So far so good.

But I need to recover those files to SOMETHING. In order to do that, I have to buy a license. I only use Mac computers for my desktops. If I buy the Mac version of the software, can I use it's license to recover from the networked NAS box? I have no need to recover data from the Mac, just from the NAS.

I want to buy the software, but I need to know which version I need to do this, as the demo's won't connect...

thanks in advance.