What is the Best File Recovery Application you have used?

corkproducers

In your replies, please give the Name,
the platform (Win/Mac/Linux), the Price (freeware/shareware) and why you found it so good.

It will be the interesting to see the replies,
if theres any good free apps, and if anyone knows what the Hard Drive Recovery Companies use.
In Cork ive read that GetDat


DiskInternals Unreaser (Windows, shareware)
This is the most user friendly program i have used, but im not sure if it's the best,
i seriously need to do more testing and comparing with the others.


For CD/DVDs:
Isobuster (windows, freeware).
I found this excellent for recovering a Quick Formatted DVD-RW,
it was badly scratched, so it had some bad sectors,
and Isobuster gave a few options when it came across them:
Retry, Ignore, Ignore All, Fill with Zeros etc...

corkproducers

Btw for recovering from clicking/broken hard drives,
i did the Freezer trick recently with a 3.5" hard drive and it actually worked,
it gave me about a half an hour or so to recover! Its not a myth.

Also, i had to recover from a clicking laptop hard drive recently,
that would very rarely boot, one in every 20 attempts maybe.

For this i just squeezed the sides of the hard drive,
and the needle stopped clicking (laptop drives are flimsy and the metal case can actually be squeezed)

I had to squeeze the hard drive with my bare hand for almost an hour,
until it was backed up to an image,
but in the end i got there! As soon as i loosened my grip it began clicking again.

This may only have worked due to how this particular drive was damaged,
it may not work for you of course, but might be worth trying out before attempting the freezer trick.

Kevster

I have n doubt that Recover My Files is the best programme that I've eveer used. It's available as an evaluation version but you're better off paying for the licence to get full capabilities.

Ref: http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

I have been using computers since as far back as I can remember, and I have made many mistakes (re: deleting important files!); so I therefore have used many different types of recovey tools too. this one (above) is the best.

Kevin

Capt'n Midnight

ddrescue and photorec

alexlyons

Data rescue 2 is incredible. Granted it jams all your files into one folder with weird names and leaves a lot of work, but it has never once failed me when I have used it. Have used it for friends camera cards, memory sticks, my own HD's etc etc

For mac btw

Gadgetman496

Active@ File Recovery

Why?

Because it has never failed to recover any time I've used it.

It costs about $35 but in my opinion it is worth every cent.

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