Best data recovery tools?

Question

So due to a recent act of stupidity and bravado, I uttered the words "backups! who needs backups?!" and what followed was the tragic loss of 260gb of data.

This scenario in particular is requiring me to recover a repartitioned hard disk, but I was wondering what tools people here use in general to recover lost data.

I'm sure everyone has been there, either accidentally rewriting files, resaving an old version, computer crash, hard disk death, user deletes an important document etc. So was thinking it might be an interesting point of discussion as to what you guys use to recover lost data.

I appologise if this is considered irrelevant, but considering there has been a few recovery questions, I think this might be interesting.

Answer 1

I've used a few in my day. ZAR Zero Assumption Recovery was very effective. While its zero assumption scan was slow, the actual result index of what it found could be saved to a file so you could recover multiple times without needing to rescan. I've used this to great effect on a hard drive that was on its way out and was no longer being recognized by Windows.

Disk Internals NTFS Recovery is another good option I've used. A long time ago I accidentally deleted my primary NTFS volume which took all my dynamic volumes with it. I was able to recovery about 99% of what I lost.

These days, the best solution is prevention. I'd highly recommend an online service such as BackBlaze to automatically, transparently, and continuously back up your files. Because no matter what, if your house burns down, no hard drive recovery software is going to get your data back. These services are cheap and unlimited, backblaze is $5 a month.

Answer 2

Under Linux, you can easily access the disk directly (by reading from /dev/[sh]d[a-z]), or the raw partition (by reading from /dev/[sh]d[a-z][0-9]+). I've had a lot of luck running grep directly on the disk, to recover text files.

Answer 3

I know the question is old, but just in case someone types it into Google in a fit of despair down the track

If all you did was hose the partition table then stop you're going to be quite successful using a Linux live CD (or maybe your actual Linux host if you didn't trash the OS disk) with Gpart on it. Gpart can scan the disk like ZAR does and find the lost partitions. When you have a successful scan you can try all the possibilities it lists (in read only mode to be sure) and usually recover all your data.

Answer 4

Following the same lines as Adam Hawes, should you reach this in despair and are already running an OS, you may try the recovery utility included with GPart called TestDisk. You can find binaries for all major distributions.

You can re instantiate deleted partitions and undelete data from them within minutes. Phew.

Answer 5

Data Loss Oh God .... Its twice happens to me, first time I had no experience about data recovery software that's why I had lost all of my data. Second time I commit First time mistake that is NO Backup of data. But this time I used all of contact, questioned in forums, blogs every where. After 2 months Some one suggest me to use stellar phoenix windows data recovery for my deleted data and I do the same and recover all of my data, but this is not a free tool it cost me around $99. But My Memories are more important than money... http://www.stellarinfo.com/

Answer 6

Try StrongRecovery for NTFS/FAT/FAT32 file recovery, it's really fast and reliable and works fine either for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7

http://www.strongrecovery.com

Answer 7

The best? There are so much software in the market, and each has its own advantages. I think it is really difficult to say which one is the best. I once lost photos from accidentally deleting and later successfully recover photos by this software. You may have a try. The trial version can let you preview the effects. Good luck.

Answer 8

I've used Spinrite for the past few years as a last-resort to recover data from dying / almost dead hard-drives. http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
I also use it every 3 months or so to scan my drives for defects..