Data Recovery Done Free–Or Nearly Free
February 13th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 7 Comments
Recently I was talking to a friend who has written several books. Her computer had just died, and she was scrambling to find ways to recover files from her hard drive, which stored many files relevant to her books. I mentioned the California-based company DriveSavers to her and she ended up getting all her files restored and placed on a new disk through them. (They’ve done the same thing for a number of celebrity clients and restored drives from demolished computers.) Especially in cases where your disk has a problem, but isn’t totally trashed, it’s good to have disk recovery tools on hand, and in addition to the Norton-type products, several free or nearly free applications can rescue you in a pinch.
Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier is a free file recovery application I’ve had success with, and it comes in a Windows version and a Linux version. It recovers files from physically damaged disks and allows you to easily copy files from disks with bad sectors, scratches, or unexplained errors. The application includes logging features so that you can see if you are getting a pristine copy of a damaged file.
R-Studio Data Recovery is another good program to try in the event of disaster, or just isolated disk errors. It costs $49.95, but you can get it for a free trial and unless you need data recovery on a regular basis, that’s probably good enough. In addition to good recovery features, R-Studio has a set of useful undelete features. Whenever I use these, I’m surprised at how files I thought were deleted completely are often still hanging around.
On the Mac, OnBelay Data Recovery for Mac has a good reputation, although I have yet to experience any drive failures on my Macs. It restores files from many different types of storage media, and it’s $29.95—much less expensive than many of the data recovery titles.
Do you know of any good free or nearly free data recovery tools?
7 Comments Post your own comment
robert says: February 13th, 2008 4:53pm
While not exactly ‘recovery’, I like RAID 1 for its simplicity. Two drives mirrored in real time. Often, everything is already on the motherboard, just needs a second drive installed and settings made.
The one time I’ve had a disk failure that would have caused data loss, it was a quick fix to replace the defective drive after a trip to the computer store.
Though neither are the same as frequent backups, preferably off-site. Or stashed in a hidden folder on your website. Or at least email yourself attachments to an account that keeps files on a remote server.
dave says: February 14th, 2008 6:29am
Another good utility for recovery and just general maintenance is an app called SpinRite from grc.org. The application has been around for a long time and Steve Gibson, the author, is very well-respected in the industry. I think it will run you about $79, but it’s not just for recovery, it’s also to tell you when your disk is nearing failure so that you don’t NEED to perform recovery!
Bob Palmer says: February 14th, 2008 9:16am
Utility software is great when used in a preventive mode. But they can also destroy your chances of getting good data back. I know DriveSavers very well and they are the safest way to get back critical files when a hard drive has died or suffered extreme damage.
Recht Zauberer says: February 15th, 2008 4:49am
Another option for deleted files or other logical errors is Easy Recovery which is made by Ontrack Data Recovery (www.ontrack.com).
Bob is right though, be careful what you do with the utility software, it can ruin your chances for a full recovery from a data recovery company.
If the data is critical, image the drive or drives to new drive(s) and work on the copies.
Business Hacks mobile edition says: February 15th, 2008 6:00am
[...] you prefer cheap, check out Web Worker Daily’s roundup of free (or nearly free) tools for recovering data from problem drives. For example: Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier is a free file recovery [...]
Joe K says: February 18th, 2008 10:38am
I’ve used SpinRite by GRC on a number of machines, and they’ve recovered the problem drive.
Joseph says: February 26th, 2008 9:37am
Please take a look here:
NT File Recovery – freeware and work quickly. These guys propose also My Flash Recovery, $29.95, find deleted files after formatting