Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools

[Deleted User]

For all those threads out there discussing the above...

http://lifehacker.com/5237503/

Another worth while read from lifehacker.

To summarise:

Which Free Data Recovery Tool is Best? (Poll Closed)

1. Recuva 45% (1408 votes)
2. TestDisk 19% (595 votes)
3. Other 16% (496 votes)
4. PhotoRec 7% (218 votes)
5. Undelete Plus 7% (226 votes)
6. Restoration 6% (182 votes)

Marty_J

Recuva seems to get the most recommendations on here.

[Deleted User]

Marty_J wrote: »

Recuva seems to get the most recommendations on here.

Yeah, agreed. I've heard good things about TestDisk too. My blood's boiling after reading their top fire AVs and malware removers... Some people just don't know :rolleyes:

kwikbreaks

It depends on how big a screwup you've had. Recuva looks to me like a simple undelete (but I haven't used it) I have used TestDisk on a 1GB external drive that both XP and Vista insisted was empty but which I knew was full of data. TestDisk determined that the partition table had been corrupted somehow and was able to recover the disk fully.

A lot of that data wasn't backed up due to its size - mostly Truemage backups and I needed one of those to recover a PC to Vista as I'd been playing with a alternate opsys on it. The only other backup had of that one was nearly a year old.

isofa

Recuva is fine for a quick search. PhotoRec and TestDisk are by far superior if you know how to use them...

spud17

Don't forget to try Pandora Recovery