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Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?

Posted by Cliff on from the rescuing-critical-data dept.

Filly-O-Fish asks: "By ironic coincidence, the day the IBM Deskstar Failures story was posted, both my 40 gig 75GXP drives failed. Whilst I don't have the cure for cancer on there, I do have some personal data that I'd really like to try to recover. No way could I afford to have it recovered by a professional data recovery company. I looked at a few software packages, the most promising one being ACR Mediatools, the demo version available only shows you your lost files though, you have to register($499) to actually recover them. Yes, I realize I should have backed them up regularly.. but I haven't had time to back 80 gigs up to CDR, and I can't afford one of these babies. Are there any alternative cheap(!)/free solutions to get my data back?"

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Helpful alternatives by man_ls · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to reconsider a professional data recovery choice, try Drivesavers. I've seen them in various computer publications and they seem to be pretty honest, but I have never used their services so I'm not sure.

    Searching C|Net Downloads I found Recover98 which seems to be the best package there. It costs $169 to register, which provides access to all features, and support for Windows 2000 dynamic drives(Software RAID arrays), NTFS 5, and it's really small. Again, I haven't tested it, but it looks decent. The trial has save features partly disabled but you can at least see if it looks good, and it is certainly cheaper than a professional data recovery service.

    I haven't had the (mis?)fortune of using an IBM hard drive since my 12.5GB one in an older system of mine. Are there any thoughts of a class-action lawsuit based on the drives' failure to perform properly? If new drives are failing this often, there is a definate problem.

    JKoebel

  2. EasyRestore by PowerQuest by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Informative


    http://www.powerquest.com/easyrestore/

  3. Re:For those of us without scads of disposable inc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I've used Norton Disk Editor to recover deleted files before, but it was a lot of work. First of all, I've only done it for FAT, I suspect it would be just about impossible with NTFS5 given the complexity of the latter.

    If you know the path to the file(s) you need and their directory entries are still intact, you can use that to find the first cluster of data... which hopefully hasn't been overwritten yet... And from there, you can walk the FAT chain to get the file back. Otherwise, if the file is a text file, you can search the whole disk for strings in the file and rebuild the thing (create a directory entry for it and write a new chain corresponding to the clusters you find).

    You can do this, and for me it was kind of an interesting exercise at first (not that I was happy about having lost so much source code), but... Consider before you start how much time you're going to spend, and how much money you could be making during that time. Automated recovery tools might start to look reasonable.