Afternoon peeps,

Has anyone been unfortunate enough to need to use a data recovery service (or failing that, data recovery software) and had a successful experience with it?

We have a scenario where a laptop needed rebuilding; a backup was taken, the machine was reimaged, but it turns out the backup wasn't checked properly and didn't actually contain any files :-/

Notwithstanding the fact that the process of reimaging the machine will have poleaxed a fair bit of data, we're making a best-effort to get some of the personal files back. Some free recovery software off the net brings lots of files back, but most of them are corrupt. I can't be sure if this is genuinely because the date is gorn, or because the software is crap.

So, if the user decides the data is sufficiently important to justify some cost, I'm looking at their options. Does anyone know of any professional services that won't charge thousands for a guy just to get his personal photos back? Are their paid-for software options that actually work?

Any thoughts appreciated (unless they retrospectively involve the word "backup" - yes he should, and I'm sure he will in future, but we're trying to be nice and do what we can in the present)

Richard

my dad had some good results from "Data Recovery Pro"
it recovered all it could, but made everything have generic filenames
looking through fill0001.jpg to file9999.jpg to find stuff you want is not fun

I would imagine that professional recovery services are just as unlikely to be able to recover the data as you are.

If it was a simple case of the drive having been quick formatted or the partition deleted then the chance of recovery would have been far greater, but as new data has been written to the drive, whatever was there is pretty much guaranteed to be gone.

Unfortunately, hard drives don't work like they do in Hollywood.

What they said, if what you're finding now is via a surface scan and is rebuilding whatever it can find then I doubt a professional (and expensive) company would be able to do anything better.

I've used PhotoRec a few times for photos deleted off memory cards and hard drives. And it's sibling TestDisk to recover some deleted files off a linux/ext3 drive.

The best program I've used it Get Data Back. It's not free but allowed me to recover files off a dying HDD that I couldn't get Windows to see properly. Don't know how it compares to other stuff though.

Same here. I use it all the time.

 

Richy,

 

It's not perfect but I suppose it's as good as you're going to get if you've written data over what you are trying to recover.

 

I think there is a forensic distro of Linux out there somewhere (I'm sure I've heard of it) and if you are as smart as Lucy you might have luck enhancing and zooming until you get the license plate number you seek.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your suggestions.

The recovery software that our guy used (locally - way to compound a problem (fail)) recovered file names, which makes me think it's just attempted to recover patches of old MFT and pull back files from that.

The recovery programs that come back with generic filename, while inconvenient to search through, theoretically actually find valid data to piece together, so it's worth a shot, especially as the priority here is photos (they're of a recently-deceased family member, which is the main reason I've not just written this whole debacle of as a learning experience for those involved)

And Matt, while I generally agree, it's conceivable that the software a professional service may have access to would be better at piecing togther whatever it finds than the freebies/cheapies you can grab off the Internet. They would also do some of that post-checking that Jon rightly mentions is so time-consuming.

Anyway, thanks again. I'll take a look at the various suggestions and see if we can have any more luck.

Since it's just photos use PhotoRec. So simple, full surface scan, recoverable stuff recovered. I think it'll even get the photos that are half written over.

As in, the half that is still there.