Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?

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?"

Comments

Helpful alternatives

[man_ls]

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

EasyRestore by PowerQuest

[Tumbleweed]

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