So if you erase a harddrive containing 200+ gigabytes of unwatched television shows and the like, you feel like a moron and might considering paying good money to get all/some of it back.
What software do you recommend?
OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro - used it - liked it. My colleagues erased about 30 gigs of data on my office machine and it got the most of it back.
That’s a very expensive program, though. $89 for the crippleware edition, starting at $199 for the real stuff, and a whopping $499 for the Professional edition you cited!
If you don’t mind supporting Tom Cruise you might want to try Diskeeper Undelete… it’s only $30 or $40 which strikes me as a bit more reasonable. No experience with that program, though; I’m still using Winternals FileRestore which they’re no longer selling.
I never noticed, I got it from our tech guy, but it was worth every penny.
FileScavenger, damn it! Cheap as hell. Works. IT REALLY WORKS!
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
49 dollars. The trial version lets you see if it can recover your files.
Note: Does not play well with drives where the actual partitions are destroyed,
but if you’re sloppy with the delete key, File Scavenger is your saviour.
Bump.
So, proving you shouldn’t mix sleep dep with Net surfing, I accidentally deleted a loooot of files the other night. The good news: I had the sense to stop using the drive in question immediately. The bad news: all of the file recovery utilities I’ve tried - including Recover Files, FileScavenger, R-Studio, and ARAX Disk Doctor - seem to be able to find the files, but the filenames have been changed to something generic starting with “Dg” (e., “Dg6920.mp3”) and are listed in the Recycler folder, rather than listing them under the folders they were originally in. Which means that I would have to recover the files, go through them one by one, rename them (presuming I can ID them in the first place), and re-sort them into their original locations.
We’re talking dozens, maybe hundreds of files I accidentally deleted: obviously, the less work I have to do to sift through them, the better. Anybody got any suggestions for other undeleters I can try which might be able to recover the filenames as well as the files themselves? Thanks.
GetDataBack for NTFS. Nuff said.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42226&highlight=getdataback
Tried GDB: unfortunately, it had the same problem as all the others; could see the files, but the filenames were turned into generic “DgXXXX” names. I guess Windows renames the files as it empties them from the Recycle Bin?
Looks like I’ll have to settle for that and rename them manually. Joy… :-(
Bah, yeah. It’s funny how a corrupted partition is better for file recovery than merely deleted files.
The other problem, which finally dawned on me, is that the undeleters are listing all of the files I deleted recently, not just the ones from the other night. Without the original file names, I’ve no idea which files are the ones I actually want to save. So I guess I’ll have to recover everything I can, then go through and figure out what to keep and what to toss.
FileScavenger, dammit. I’ve probably used them all (my luck with electronics will make for an excellent novel sometime), and FS is without a single doubt the best.
Heck, I paid actual money for the damn thing; that’s got to speak its own language.
As I said, I tried FileScavenger and it had the same problem as all the rest: couldn’t see / recover the original filenames. Right now it looks like getting back my files isn’t an issue; it’ll be sorting through and renaming them all.
I’ll give FreeUndelete a shot when I get home - thanks for the pointer.
Ah, sorry mate. I looked at the OP.
Seconded. Used this several times and it’s a superb program. Has performed well in partition deletion scenarios for me too, but recovery there is all about how much data you have written back since.