I recently had occasion to discuss drive recovery software with a former coworker, who had recently deleted a lot of material from an important Flash drive.
Naturally, it was her ambition to recovery the deleted material, though the only solutions she could find were both expensive and intimidating to the novice.
Indeed, the data recovery field is a technical one and, as it turns out, a very crowded one as well.
A quick Google search for "
Flash Drive Recovery" returned more than 2.2 million results! Many of these results lead to recovery packages promising huge delivery of lost data, but at huge expense as well -- $100 to $500 would seem a reasonable fee indeed when one's data is gone, and that's
precisely the sticker price of many products! To me, charging fees to that order seems a bit predacious, considering the desperation of the consumer in that circumstance!
Fortunately for my coworker, I was aware of a recovery tool for Windows with a far smaller price tag: $0.00!
From the
Recuva.com web site:
Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!
And it most certainly
does bring back files deleted by any manner of causes, including physical drive damage. In that extreme circumstance, however, one must anticipate that the recovery may
not be complete -- that is, files lost to drives which have been crushed, crashed, mushed, burnt, et al. will have a much
lower recovery rate. It has been my personal experience with Recova though that a large majority of data
can be brought back.
Some months ago, I realized that my photos from my
September 2007 pilgramage to baseball Mecca (that's Boston's Fenway, for the uninitiated) were missing from my computer hard drive. They were also missing from my digital camera.
Further, my computer hard drive is a busy place; and I knew that even if I
did manage to recovery deleted files from my computer hard drive, I would have thousands (probably tens of thousands) of files to parse through in order to locate my deleted Fenway pictures. Even in that circumstance, there was
no guarantee that the sectors of my hard drive which had formerly contained those photos were even recoverable.
My digital camera, on the other hand, isn't quite as "busy" of a location. There was a good chance that the sectors of its expansive Flash memory would still contain a number of my Boston photos.
So I took a chance and after
hours of researching recovery software (and nearly biting the bullet on a paid solution), I found Recova -- which is free as in beer.
Running the software was a dream (very easy) and its deep scan was able to pull rabbits out of a hat, and returned almost
all of my lost images. Words simply cannot express the relief in having those photos back. After all, the events they chronical were one of a kind -- there simply was
no way to recreate them as the circumstances just would never have been the same.
From my experience with the accidental loss of my photos, I now store
all my photos on Flickr for safe keeping -- they're still on my computer, of course, but the online duplicates are an insurance policy against future melt downs or breaches in personal data policy.
I also use an online data backup service, iDrive.com, but that's a subject for a separate post.
For now, take away the name of a great
free data recovery software, Recova (recova.com). Try it out and keep this in mind for those occasions in the future when you, too, feel the panic of realizing some important data or documentation is missing.
Labels: free data recovery software
I'm doing the end-zone touchdown dance right now, as my 6-month quest to discover the identity of the mystery white sauce served at local Mexican restaurants may be finally drawing to a close.
