It seems that data recovery has been a growing trend in recent years. There are many reasons for this potentially unfortunate phenomenon: from the worrying amount of people who have started storing their digital information on hard disks to the fact that having a copy of your data stored somewhere else makes it very easy to do a full backup and be sure you will never lose all your files at once. Whatever the reason may be, there is no question about how important it is to make backups regularly – and not only occasionally!
Of course, accidents happen too: sometimes disks crash without any warning or other error that prevents us from accessing our precious documents. In these cases, we can do nothing but hope for a good solution/recovery tool! Luckily, there are a lot of them out there, and it may be pretty challenging to choose the appropriate one. Salesforce data backup can be a good option.
This article will list some of the most popular tools for solving data recovery issues – both free and commercial ones. To make a fair comparison between them, I have tried to find the following criteria: price, ease of use, the functionality offered, the time required for full recovery job completion, potential results. To avoid too many interpretations, I have taken only two types of problems into account: deleted files recovery and hard disk crash recovery.
Things to note
Please note that what is discussed here does not include CD/DVD data recovery, even when these failures can result in precisely the same consequences – loss or damage of your precious data! This is just because most people never store anything on CDs or DVDs – they use them only for backup purposes, and in this case, the data they carry is not important enough to spend time and effort on recovering it. Also, note that I won’t be discussing RAID recovery in this article for the very same reason: when you lose a disk in RAID1/RAID0 configuration, you do not necessarily lose your data; when you lose two disks in RAID5 configuration [the most popular nowadays] there’s almost no chance of recovering all your files without help from an expert (I say ‘almost’ because some recoveries were done by people who seemed to know what they were doing).
But let’s start with something helpful – if not directly related to our topic.
Best free file recovery software
It describes some of the most popular – and effective – free data recovery tools out there, together with links on how to download them;
How to undelete files gives a brief overview of what you can do if you accidentally delete your files (and your first thought is not “Oh no! I’ve lost all my files!” but “My goodness! I deleted something important!”);
Unformat Seagate external hard disk describes one more tool for solving some types of disk crash problems, but unfortunately, it doesn’t include programs for Windows. But still worth reading as long as you have/use some other OS than Windows 😉 Now let’s move on to the most crucial part – disk failure data recovery!
Recover deleted files is a very brief and straightforward guide that can be used as an introduction for those who need some basic advice on working with different types of software;
Seagate external hard drive files undelete quite popular tools that recover data from Seagate external drives (of course, not only SEs). This article combines information about programs and steps necessary for using them correctly;
How to recover files
From a failing hard disk describes a more complex process, but if you want to avoid extra expenses, this is probably one of the best options. The author also adds some recommendations on what YOU should do BEFORE starting your recovery job to succeed!
Now let’s move on to commercial products. Although they are usually more expensive, you can be sure that the quality will be much better due to their developers’ experience. And it is always nice when you try something for which you have already paid.
How to Recover Data after a hard drive failure describes some of the most popular (and effective) data recovery tools and advice on what steps should be taken before starting recovery;
Recover Damaged.RAW Photos is an article dedicated to one specific type of recoveries – RAW photo files [which I assume most people use]. It includes some very interesting and helpful information can be used whenever we need to recover files from damaged or corrupted partitions;
Mac’s file recovery software
It describes one of the most popular data recovery tools – DiskWarrior, which is especially useful when repairing disk failure problems. It seems to be much more expensive than other similar programs on this list, but I guess that money may well be worth spending in some cases.
DiskWarrior read-only mode is an interesting article about using DiskWarrior’s read-only mode (that’s what the “RO” in RO Mode stands for), which makes it possible to use all powerful features without actually making any changes on your disk! Even though this option cannot be used when you need to recover files, still it could save your time and nerves 🙂
Recovering lost partitions describes one more program for damaged disk recovery – R-Linux. It is pretty expensive, but judging from the comments I’ve read before writing this post, it seems to be much better than other programs on this list (and even a bit better than DiskWarrior). And since we’re talking about disk failure data recovery here, maybe you should also check How to fix a corrupted hard drive or recover data from a bad flash drive to prepare yourself for what may happen.
Want to know what data recovery tools are the best? That’s a very good question! However, I believe that you won’t find a definite answer here – it all depends on your needs and, of course, on your pocket. Anyway, you can always look at this article to find out which programs other people prefer and then decide for yourself!
