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BEST
FREE FILE RECOVERY UTILITIES
If
you are on a tight budget, you can choose from a
number of free, trial or open source file recovery
utilities. The advantage to a free
data recovery program is, of course, the cost.
The disadvantage is that these pieces of software
are usually maintained by independent developers or
a community of developers. While there are certainly
exceptions, this model usually leads to a less
stable product with little to no technical support.
Freeware can also often fall by the wayside in terms
of development, and may be outdated by the time you
get to it. Open source software also tends to
presume a more advanced user base. That is, the
programs will be less user-friendly.
If you are comfortable with all of the above, then a
free file recovery utility might be worth shot.
Lifehacker has a good list of the top
5 free data recovery tools. Topping the list
is TestDisk, a cross-platform command line tool for
recovering data from formatted/corrupted disks and
undeleting files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 file
systems. Whereas TestDisk is an all-in-one tool,
PhotoRec is made by the same group but focuses more
on finding photos, videos, documents and other
common files after a file system has been corrupted.
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BEST PAID FILE RECOVERY UTILITIES
In an era abound with free
software, many are reluctant to shell out any kind of
real money for a data recovery program. But the price
you pay for your data recovery utility should be
commensurate with the value that you place on your lost
data. And when you compare it to the cost of having a
professional data recovery lab reclaim your data,
investing in a commercial piece of software is a
significant savings.
While I haven't tried every
single professional data recovery tool on the market, I
have put a few of the top names to the test and have
settled on a favorite. As an all-in-one data recovery
utility, I like to use R-Studio. It's incredibly
user-friendly, supports all the major file systems and
is surprisingly fast as well. But best of all, beneath
its user-friendliness are a range of advanced tools,
like a hex editor, RAID reconstruction module and a file
previewer. This makes it a well-balanced tool for the
most common tasks that I encounter in the field. At $180
for the R-Studio Network edition (which supports data
recovery over the Internet or a Local Area Network),
R-Studio is definitely not cheap. But if you perform
more than one major data recovery task, it easily pays
for itself. For home use, you might want to try out R-Undelete by
the same company, which is less expensive but has a
smaller feature set.
In the past, I have tried
some other "off-the-shelf" programs, like Search &
Recover, which you can now get at Best Buy for around
$20. Search & Recover was fine, but you'll get about
the same mileage as you would from a free utility.
Lately, I've also seen "data recovery sticks" for sale
for about $200. I would caution against these. They are
nothing but a bootable file recovery utility imaged onto
a $5 USB drive, which is something you could easily make
on your own. For example, R-Studio has an emergency
edition which can be burned onto a CD or imaged onto a
USB stick. TestDisk is also found bundled on the
Ubuntu Rescue Remix, which is a distribution of Linux
with some disk repair and data recovery programs
included.
I hope the above information helps you make a
cost-effective and prudent decision. Best of luck!
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