Data recovery software review

How to recover data from your hard drive, when it died, or is corrupted, or the MBR is missing, or is unreadable?

That’s kind of question I hope you would never have to ask yourself. For, when it happens, you’re usually in trouble.

Backups are here to prevent such drastic recovery, yes, but sometimes, things don’t happen as smoothly as forecast.

Situation

I had a HD that was happily running on a NAS, but since two years, a SMART error was thrown. I bought a new disk and had planned to mount both the new and old disk in another machine, so I just would have to copy/paste the data from the old HD to the new HD.

But I didn’t expect the NAS HD to have three partitions, one being in FAT16, containing the OS. Windows 7 refused to mount this disk. I then had the luminous idea to mount it as “Dynamic Drive”.

The brilliant idea destroyed the MBR.

For the record, the MBR contains (among other things) the index of the data stored on the HD. When you lose your MBR, you lose the partition, file names, saved date and folders structure.

Thus, my problem was a HD that displayed as RAW in Windows 7, with a destroyed MBR.

My configuration was: Windows 7 64bits, RAID controller (though the HD wasn’t in an array), a HD to recover that had a FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. The NTFS was the one I needed to recover.

Softwares

I naively thought that among the thousands of recovery softwares available, one at least would be able to recover the data.

That is not the case. So, here is the list of all the softwares I tried, bought and tested, also with the results I obtained.

I hope that might save some of you money and time.

Reviews

A good place to start is by reading reviews of the available softwares on the market, here is where I started to digg: TopTenReviews.com.

The first three are the one that interested me. I eliminated DT Utilities Digital Rescue 2010 for the following reasons:

• doesn’t recover data from deleted partition
• lack of RAID support, though the company claims that it can recover RAID, it didn’t detect any HD that were attached to the RAID controller. Maybe a driver problem

That left me with the other two.

Recover my files v4 from GetData

RecoverMyFiles was the one I came back to, over and over and eventually I bought the software.

The reasons of my choice were:

• RAID support
• Windows 7 support
• ease of use
• Recover both FAT and NTFS

But, it wasn’t a so good choice. First, I expected to have my files neatly recovered, with all the folders structure and file names.

That’s not possible with a missing MBR. You can try whatever program, it won’t recover the files names.

So, this is what you can expect from Recover My files:

• looooong time to parse the disk (20 hours for 150GB)
• The more file types, the longer the search. Choose well.
• Not all file types are candidates for recovery
• The good news is that you can save the search, thus browse the HD whenever you want without have to go through the search again

• Fair price 69.99$

Before buying, search for a coupon code on Google. I was able to buy it with 25% off, thus only for 52$.

The results of the search didn’t satisfied me for the following reasons:

• all the files are stacked within one folder. It’s up to you to sort exe from pdf, from jpg and so on
• a lot of files are unreadable, about 70% of them actually, I mean that they have been recovered, but I cannot read them. Though I’m not sure the software is at fault here
• Not all files can be recovered, for instance, if you have RAW file from you favorite camera, you can forget them

But I admit, I have a difficult case.

Disk Internal Partition recovery

DiskInternal Partition recovery has a confusing name, as it actually recovers your data. It can recover both FAT and NTFS, though you can choose to buy only one of the version.

The good points:

• RAID support (controller, not the array, you have to buy their other software to recover arrays)
• Fast search (about one hour for 150GB)
• Recover ALL the file types
• Sort the files per type and folder

The bad points:

• No possibility to save the search
• The price!!! About 140$ with rebate! If I weren’t so desperate to recover my data I would never had paid such a price!

I ended with this software, despite the price, because it was the only one which was able to retrieve all the data.

I first used PartitionRecovery with the “extensive search” option, which took about an hour and produced many, many files, sorted per types, but 99% of them were unreadable. I suspect that with this kind of search I only recovered files that had been deleted since a long time.

I complained at the provider of the software (DiskInternal) and I received a very quick answer. Then I tried the “quick search” and the miracle happened! All my files and folders structure appeared! Even with the MBR broken and Windows wanting to know nothing about the disk!

Then, I highly recommend this software. It is the only one that was capable of such a recovery.