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I recently had my mother-in-law call me on the brink of tears! All because her data had been lost off of her USB flash drive.
The IT professional at her office’s solution was to pay $400 to get it recovered. But there is a much less costly alternative.
For this reason, I decided to share with the world how easy current software has made it to recover data from: hard drives, removable storage, files deleted from the recycle bin, deleted emails, or data that was lost due to many unforeseen catastrophes or acts of sabotage.
Topics that we’ll cover today include:
Topics that will be covered in my next article:
Being able to identify the difference between logical and physical damage will help you determine when to try data recovery software and when to seek professional help.
Data recovery software works great in the cases listed above: when you accidently deleted something, formatted, or data was lost due to a virus. They also work for instances of logical damage.
Logical damage is a problem with the file system. Common causes of logical damage are a power outage or rebooting while data is being accessed or saved.
If you believe you have a hard drive with logical damage you can try to run chkdsk, or do a system restore. If these don’t give you the results you need then peruse data recovery software.
Physical damage is a hardware issue. It is a physical problem with the head, platters, or other components.
Signs of physical damage include:
If the damage is physical, do an image of the drive that you want to recover first. Then do the recovery on that image. This is because the drive itself could fail completely at any moment.
Don’t attempt running recovery software on a drive with severe physical damage. Trying to run the drive at all will cause undue stress. Consider hiring a professional data recovery company if you absolutely must recover the date.
Recovering data from physical damage requires more that simply running an application. It is specific to the type of damage that has occurred, and opening a drive must be done in a static and dust free environment.
Some data recovery software doesn’t have any search tools. Even those that do might not be as useful as you may think.
For example, some programs have search tools, but you cannot search by name. A good program will allow you to search by name, date, and file type.
Many companies will let you run a trial version of their software first to see if your files are recoverable. Then after you are satisfied that you found what you needed, you can purchase the full version; which in turn grants you access to your recovered files.
When I was recovering my mother-in-law’s USB flash drive I made the mistake of running a NTFS recovery program—which I already had—on her removable drive (USB and SD cards as a rule use the FAT file system).
In this case, it didn’t hurt anything but got me nowhere. Make sure the program you choose does both or more. That way you don’t run into the problem of having to purchase a second product as circumstances arise.
You never know what you will end up trying to recover. Look for software that includes tools to recover CDs and DVDs that have bad sectors. I have even seen products that include iPod recovery tools.
If partitions are a part of your life, make sure you find software that can handle a deleted or changed partition.
Many newer programs can even recover deleted e-mails from various e-mail clients. Check out the software you are interested in to see if they support the kind of e-mail that you use.
This lets you chose to recover an older version of a file even if a newer one exists (some versions of Vista have a feature to do this as well). We can all think of a time when we wished we could do go back to a previous save point.
If you don’t already have software that can image, then this is an important feature. Sometimes you know that complete self destruction is looming. In this case making an image is quicker and puts lets stress on the drive. You can then run the recovery on the image.
Most current software has a plethora of file types that the software will recover. All programs will recover the basics like .doc and .jpg.
If you are using any obscure applications that save in their own file types, make sure they are listed on the software you are considering. Some programs even offer additional plug-ins that support more file types.
This solves the problem of having to open up two computers in order to connect the unstable drive to a stable one. You can run the software on a unstable computer from a stable computer across your network.
Be sure to watch for my next article where we practice using data recovery software, and talk about how to avoid needing to do a recovery altogether.
RBS MONI Says:
August 27th, 2008 at 7:27 am
It is really wonderfull & Excellent
Joby M Chacko Says:
August 30th, 2008 at 3:17 am
can you sugest which recovery software is best, this article is really informative