2.28.2011

My File Recovery Story

These days hard drive manufacturers are pushing the terabyte limits, so I thought this would be a good time to find a cheap backup solution for personal and business use at least for the interim.  As already implied from reading the title of this post, I ended up losing data.  But I learned far more than I ever expected.  Here's my story.

I had just bought a shiny new 500GB external storage device to be used as a central backup location.  I figured it would be large enough to hold all my files from the various places: my home pc, an external hard drive enclosure, and 2 usb flash drives.  So I have every device plugged into my pc and I started to move data to this new backup device.  I have multiple explorer windows open and I see a flurry of dialog messages with the all familiar file-transfer animation.  Everything is working just fine and after an hour or so it's all complete.  Success. At this point, I was proud.  I was responsible enough to be proactive in backup before an imminent hard drive failure occurred.

The hdd enclosure was now reformatted to NTFS and the usb drives to FAT32.  (If you want to know why, read here)  After a few seconds into the format of one of the flash drives, I had a deer in headlights uh-oh moment.  I was formatting the one good backup that I had.  Talk about failure.  I quickly did what anyone else in that moment would have done - I pulled the cable.  I used diskpart, a DOS utility, but I had indicated the wrong drive to format.  This was all in an attempt to create a bootable usb flash drive.  Ok, enough of the excuses.  It was all my own fault.


Initially I didn't really worry too much because I knew a reformat, at least a quick one, didn't visit every cylinder of every head of every sector to do an erase.  All it does is remove references to those files on disk I thought.  So, I researched into several recovery products online.  Here's a list of them:
As is the case with emergency data recovery, I was price insensitive to the cost of software.  The only thing I wasn't willing to do was send it to a lab.  The top two on the list are not free (all under $100), but the Data Recovery Wizard comes in a free edition.  The caveat is that you are limited to 1GB of data recovered.  As far as time investment is concerned, let's just say you have to be very patient.  A full scan using each of these products took anywhere between 5 and 8 hours.  Remember, this is only a 5400 rpm 500 GB drive.  Also, keep the drives well ventilated because the constant head movement will make this thing hotter than you ever want it to run.

I ran each software at least twice just to be sure it got all my files.  Unfortunately, none of them were able to recover everything in it's entirety because file names were lost.

There are my findings:

Data Recovery Wizard Professional v5.0.1 - A very intuitive product.  Great for the novice user.  Free up to 1GB with the free edition.

SpinRite 6.0 - I was excited to use this product, but it couldn't even find my damaged disk drive.  Somewhat of a disappointment.  It is still, however, a great product.  It just didn't help me in my situation here.

Recuva - Another great product for the novice user.  Recommended as it is free.

PhotoRec - Open Source +1 (distributed under GNU General Public License).  Please see the list of file formats recovered with this tool.  No GUI so this is probably best for advanced users only.

Conclusion:

Sometimes the best things in life are free.  The best products were Recuva and PhotoRec.  I recommend Recuva for those users who require a GUI and want a no fuss solution.