Data Recovery Software
The other day, Veronica came to me with a problem: all of the files on her USB stick were no longer there - the drive had been wiped out. She’s not quite sure what happened, but I imagine it was related to quality of the hardware itself (it was one of those branded tchotchkes everybody gives away at conferences). I knew she hadn’t formatted the drive, as that would require jumping through a couple of minor technical loops. Happens all the time.
No matter, I had to figure out how to recover the missing documents and spreadsheets before anything else touched the drive (which, by the way, lived largely inside a MacBook USB port or her purse). I searched the Web for data recovery utilities, and discovered several free titles that would help people recover images from removable media (CompactFlash, SD, MMC, Memory Stick). They wouldn’t work in this situation, however.
I didn’t realize that Allume had just released a $20 version of MediaRECOVER - or I would have likely purchased it without question:
When you think about all the times your digital gadgets have gone haywire, or you’ve hit the wrong button and lost important files, you probably wish you had a way to undo those mistakes. That’s why anyone who relies on digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, Flash Drives, memory cards and other modern media should have MediaRECOVER.
Instead, I used a relatively clumsy, but free, application called PC INSPECTOR File Recovery. This utility is not very well designed (the options and labels are rather confusing, all the way through). Still, I didn’t plan on using the program for an extended period of time - and it did do quite well at recovering 90% of the files that had been erased from the flash disk. Too bad the only file we really needed was lost in the 10% that we couldn’t recover.
I guess I should start amassing a list of tools to use the next time this happens to me - so if you know of a good data recovery tool (shareware, freeware, etc.), please let me know your thoughts. It’d be good to have a semi-definitive list here for future reference.
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16 Comments
Dan
May 14th, 2007
at 4:47am
Chris, You actually had this one on your weekly picks a while back. I added it to my bookmarks just in case.
http://www.undelete-plus.com/
Dan
May 14th, 2007
at 8:52am
1. http://www.file-recovery.net/
2. O&O DiskRecovery V4.1 @ http://www.oosoftware.com/smb/en/products/
Dan
May 14th, 2007
at 8:52am
1. http://www.file-recovery.net/
2. O&O DiskRecovery V4.1 @ http://www.oosoftware.com/smb/en/products/
Dan
May 14th, 2007
at 8:56am
1. http://www.oo-software.com/smb/en/products/ - O&O DiskRecovery V4.1
2. http://www.file-recovery.net/
Two good products if n when you’ll ever need this again!
Mark Bowman
May 14th, 2007
at 11:40am
getdataback is what you want. I use this all this time professionally and it works very well on corrupted/deleted files.
Brandon Walkin
May 14th, 2007
at 12:26pm
This software is pretty much the standard in the IT world for data recovery:
Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional
http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
The Chris Pirillo Show
May 14th, 2007
at 1:00pm
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Rob Gibson
May 14th, 2007
at 6:28pm
One other possibility is GetDataBack for either NTFS or FAT. It is available form http://www.runtime.org, and it works wonderfully. They have a free trial, and the price is quite attractive for what you can get.
Burningalive
May 16th, 2007
at 1:29pm
I’ve used this free tool to recover files many times and it works well. The only issue is that it only recovers one file at a time. It’s called Restoration.
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,23108-order,1-page,1-c,filemanagement/description.html
John
May 17th, 2007
at 2:09am
Try Drive Rescue - I’ve had repair shops tell me “there’s nothing on that HD” and then used it to recover any/all files I wanted to.
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May 17th, 2007
at 8:21am
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Scribblepinch
May 19th, 2007
at 5:12pm
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Jason
May 30th, 2007
at 7:06am
I came across this software. It worked for me.
http://www.cbltech.com/data-recovery/software/
Audio Video Help
June 8th, 2007
at 5:47pm
drive as an actual drive. If you take the drive out while it’s in the middle of a read/write operation,. It could actually damage the data on the disk. You could end up the errors and the operating system may not be able to read any of the data on it. Data Recovery SoftwareDigital Photo Recovery Also keep in mind that flash drives have a shelf life. While they’re solid state, data can only be written to and read from so many times before it no longer functions the way it was intended to.
Pirillovision
June 8th, 2007
at 5:56pm
as an actual drive. If you take the drive out while it’s in the middle of a read/write operation,. It could actually damage the data on the disk. You could end up the errors and the operating system may not be able to read any of the data on it. Data Recovery Software Digital Photo Recovery Also keep in mind that flash drives have a shelf life. While they’re solid state, data can only be written to and read from so many times before it no longer functions the way it was intended to.
Salvager
October 31st, 2007
at 5:06am
I had success recovering my deleted files using Instant File Recovery. Good utility…
http://diskdoctors.net/instant-file-recovery/software.html