Data Recovery Software

[jim]

Just wondering if anyone had any recommendations for data recovery software.

My dad forgot to tell me about some photos on his PC before I reinstalled Windows, so they've been through a format process. I think it's highly unlikely that there's anything there, but I am a little hopeful because the disk usage now is far lower than it was previously, so with a bit of luck any photographs are further out on the disk than is currently being occupied - and also I want to at least try.

I've used a few different bits of software in the past for this purpose, but they've rarely seemed much cop, so does anyone have any recommendations?

By the way, I know that he should have made backups, and he's just as aware of the fact, but there you go . As he said, you only miss stuff once it's gone.

[blueball]

I use File Scavenger - incredibly fast. Not sure how it will work on a formatted disk but you can download a demo.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

Another one I tried in the past was "Getright back" - you'll need to google it.

[jim]

Cheers for those, I think I'll build up a miniature library of data recovery tools on my USB and give a range of them a crack.

[Barry]

RecoverMyFiles is very good, it costs but its well worth it.

[peterb]

How much you get back depends on the nature of the format. Remember that format only installs a new partition table and file system, it doesn't overwrite all the disk, so unless they were on a portion of the disk that has been overwritten, the data will still be there.

Thats the good news. the bad news is that it may not be in contiguous sectors, and if the pointers have been lost, then data recovery, while possible, is much trickier. Tools, such as the ones mentioned may help. I would suggest something like Winhex, but you need a lot of patience and skill to use it.

You might want to have a look at this

www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

I have used other products from them (but not this one) and I was quite impressed.

[montyjo]

Stellar phoenix data recovery software I had tried in past that's why I have to suggest this one only.
This software looks good, work good and price is also good.

Cheers..

[vinnyT]

I use recuva portable http://www.recuva.com/download/builds it's free, and because you run it from usb stick you do not run the risk of overwriting anymore stuff by installing it.

[jim]

Ahh, forgot about this thread.

Sadly the data recovery attempt was an epic failure - nothing useful whatsoever, although my dad did turn up quite a few photographs that he'd attached to emails in his googlemail account so it wasn't all bad news.