which data recovery software

[yoshiserry]

can someone gimme a rundown of data recovery software, in two catergories, both free and paid programs, also weather you have personally used it and just simply an idea on how easy it was to use and how it went.

Because im trying to find out a comparison, and which is good data recovery software because lets face it there is lots out there.

[pam123]

Good solid stuff for ordinary mortals is this : http://www.runtime.org/

This is "Getdataback" and for most things users mess up it works and the price is reasonable.

For true disasters we have to up the price and you might as well go for these guys : http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/0...psearch=google

They may be able to get the data back even if the hard drive is in several pieces.

Moral of the story?

Back up!

[XenaWP]

My favorite recovery software is (as Pam said) ... a recent backup.

I've used PC Inspector (free) which does a good job but falls a little short where the boot record is messed up.

I've also used File Scavenger ($40-ish) which did a great job for me. I had installed Win XP over top of some important photos, video, and other data files. FS did a remarkable job recovering the overwritten boot record, and recovered all the files except those where new files were actually installed. I had a backup that was several months old and restored that as my starting point, then used FS to find/restore the newer files that weren't in the backup.

It's good software, but everything has its limitations.

[Lespaul20]

I've used Recovermyfiles at work. It's $70 for one PC. It seemed to work pretty good. recovered a crap load of pictures from a drive that had a bad file system.

[glc]

Don't forget Spinrite.

The best software out there is Ontrack Easy Recovery. It's also the most expensive.

[mikeL]

I also use spinrite, great program although a little pricey but have had great results

[glc]

Spinrite is not traditional recovery software. It excels at getting info out of bad sectors and locking them out to try to make a failing drive usable. Traditional software is used to recover files and copy them to a different drive.