Effective Hard Drive data recovery programs

I had a situation; 1 TB of data was lost due to a mistake on my part. Accidentally reformatted the drive...and a 10 minutes of crazy head banging on the bed ensued .

Now, I bought a program called iCare Data Recovery Software; it works well and restores my previous partition...however it does not rename 99% of the files. Is there a better performer out there on the market? Experiences as well + features?

Am in the process of recovering it right now, 12 hours to go. I am willing to get another software if it provides renaming of files and folders.

 

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download


this saved like 300 gigs of music for me on my damage external

On a side note. Titles and info like that are probably lost due to the formating and i bet thats unrecoverable.

EDIT: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-ever-growing-free-windows-software-list.html this sticky has every free program you will ever need

 

I personally use EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, very good program. Does take a long time to run.

 

Well I've seen people recovered along with folders, names and things...I was wondering if NBR knows well. Ill try Recuva out later, not at home to see if iCare actually recovered my files after the 12 hour run. Maybe i'll fire up my older, damaged HDD for Recuva to handle it

Well, time doesn't matter, for me at least. Does it recover names and folders?

 

Active@ Partition Recovery Enterprise <- works if it doesn't crash
Advanced Disk Recovery
Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional <- works most time for me
Pc inspector File Recovery
Recover My Files
Hdd recovery Pro

Got those installed ... recovered dieing seagate 500Gb .. recovered mbr corrupted flashdrive.

There is difference in recovery softwares .. some searches the fat/ntfs logs for files that been deleted and restores them if not over writen
others like above searching disk surface for file signatures without the need for mbr/fat/ntfs ...
Until the hdd runs and device manager detects it but raw or empty some if not all can be recovered.

ps.: format only kills 1 partition table .. recover the backup one and all data magically back where it was ... quick format ....
if the slow format then ... time to use some professional recovery service ..

 

You might try DFSee. If you did a quick format, it should be able to detect the original partition table and restore that. It's not the simplest of products to use but the author does good support for registered users.

For a long format, it might still find the files and recover them, but I think it would have the same problems with file names you are seeing. This depends on how the file system stores the names and what the formatting does. I'm pretty sure the NTFS (I'm assuming you are using Windows) stores the file names in the MFT. DFsee can search the rest of the drive and find files, but if it can't find the file in the MFT, it can't name it correctly. That is probably what is happening with the tool you are using.

 

I tried Recuva, and it works well. Actually very well infact!

I was able to recover EVERYTHING including 95% of the folder names and items, and even supports encoded character naming (japanese characters).

It was really easy to use, and no hassle in recovering it in about 24hours. Sometimes it says it's unrecoverable...but it appeared in the recovered files after, which was weird...oh well the "unrecoverable" files works anyway.

 

if its unrecoverable and recovers it than beware it may not work or partially work. if it says poor condition same thing applies some will be recovered but corruption will exist.

 

Yeah before you jump for joy verify your files. I've seen many data recovery programs restore stuff only to be all corrupt.

 

recuva has settings where you can set it to recover all files or only perfect files or any number of combinations. I don't know if he did that or not.

 

I tried the supposedly "unrecovered" files, one of them being an ISO of Caesar 3 that I lost long ago. It installed fine, game runs fine and there's no errors. I did lose a few things but that's okay; the more important ones are there. There's alot to check...but at least it already gave me high hopes.

@DCMAKER: I did a deep scan + scan for non-deleted files and also folder structure recovery.

 

Well that's good to hear. Just don't accidentally format your drive again