What Data Recovery Software?

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scottay

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Good day all,

Sorry if this has been asked a million times - I did a quick search but didn't find an answer to my question.

What data recovery software do you use and recommend?

I've tried a few of the free ones, but haven't had very good success with them. I also own Easeus Data Recover Professional. It does a pretty good job most of the time; however, I have a drive that I'm trying to work on that is being a PITA and would like to know if you guys have another software that you have good/better success.

Ideally it would be nice to find one that uses a boot CD, whether it uses WinPE or a Linux distro since a few of the drives I've tried to recover have locked up my system or made it extremely slow. With a boot CD I could throw the CD into my test machine and let it be the work horse, independent of the OS, so I can keep my main PC usable for me to use.

Thanks!
 
For a Boot CD solution I use UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) which has TestDisk and PhotoRec. I too use EASUS.

For a Windows OS Based Solution I use R-Studio, but if the drive is really on the fritz.. R-Studio can become unresponsive waiting for the drive to do, whatever it is trying to do.
 
+1 for R-studio. I use it as well. If that doesn't do the trick it's time to suggest a professional clean room data recovery company.
 
The 2 programs that seem to be the most popular are R-Studio & GetDataBack. The trial offers will at least show you what they can recover.
 
Thank you all for your input.

I've used UBCD, but for some reason this drive was even locking up the Linux distribution.

I'll check out R-Studio and GetDataBack for the future. I don't have the cashflow at the moment to buy new software, but if you guys think they're worth adding to my arsenal I'll be happy to look into them.
 
As a shameless plug for R-Studio..

The only reason I purchased this software is because I had a customer that had a Lacie in a RAID config in which the controller died. After trying other software (wish I could remember what they were now) only R-Studio worked. One of the drives was flaky as well, but R-Studio is able to mount the drives from images and rebuild the array virtually. Worked a treat.
 
Awesome, thanks.

If you have a drive that's not cooperating do you image the drive (via UBCD or whatever) and recover from that? I've never done that before, but it sure makes sense.
 
Ya, if the drive is having a real hardware failure I am still forced to use a Linux tool. The problem with R-Studio is that Windows seems to choke on drives that are having PCB or other hardware issues, R-Studio Goes unresponsive until the drive is unhooked from the system. Sometimes the Linux tools overcome this.. but most of the time they don't.. the drive is simply too far gone.

EDIT:

Forgot to say... No, if I make an image from UBCD I don't pump it into R-Studio, I just use UBCD.
 
Last edited:
I used Recover My Files in the passed and had very good luck just make sure you have disk space on dump drive. I usually get 150%-400% more data. but the program cost $.
 
This is my first attempt at data recovery using R-Studio. I am using the Demo version at the moment. I have a lot of Green/Orange/Red "Recognized files" after the scan.

However, much of the data that I preview opens in a hexadecimal view with a bunch of gibberish. I have yet to recover anything useful except for a few pictures.

This pc was reformatted about a week ago, so the HD has not had much of anything written to it since that time.

Is this the norm for data recovery? Does it typically return a lot of unintelligible hexadecimal stuff when you try to open recovered word/excel files, etc.?
 
katz said:
This is my first attempt at data recovery using R-Studio. I am using the Demo version at the moment. I have a lot of Green/Orange/Red "Recognized files" after the scan.

However, much of the data that I preview opens in a hexadecimal view with a bunch of gibberish. I have yet to recover anything useful except for a few pictures.

This pc was reformatted about a week ago, so the HD has not had much of anything written to it since that time.

Is this the norm for data recovery? Does it typically return a lot of unintelligible hexadecimal stuff when you try to open recovered word/excel files, etc.?
Click to expand...

r-Studio can be very intimidating when first using it. There are so many different options on it that it will sometimes overwhelm you. I remember the first recovery job I done using it. Somehow, I ended up recovering over a terabyte of data from an 120G HDD by selecting don't overwrite the files or something lol.


---
I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.848722,-85.145911
 
katz said:
This is my first attempt at data recovery using R-Studio. I am using the Demo version at the moment. I have a lot of Green/Orange/Red "Recognized files" after the scan.

However, much of the data that I preview opens in a hexadecimal view with a bunch of gibberish. I have yet to recover anything useful except for a few pictures.

This pc was reformatted about a week ago, so the HD has not had much of anything written to it since that time.

Is this the norm for data recovery? Does it typically return a lot of unintelligible hexadecimal stuff when you try to open recovered word/excel files, etc.?
Click to expand...

Yes it's normal for good recovery software that really digs deep.
 
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