Data Recovery

[seekermeister]

I just used O&O's Disk Recovery 6, trying to reover from files from a drive that I had repartitioned. It works modestly well, as far as actually recovering the files, once you sort through all of the possible files that it finds, but like in the case at hand, there are over 300,000 files, and the version that I use only lets me recover 1000 at a time. I know that they have a newer version without this limit, but even so it would still require endless rummaging to find exactly what you want, because it scans the entire drive, without letting one set a search zone, and it labels all of the files with it own numbering system, rather than the files original identity.

This makes me wonder if there is a recovery program available that would be easier to use?

 

[carwiz]

Try Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR). I have it on one of my XP machines. It's not free (except the photo recovery) but you can use it is as a trial and test. It used to have a three or four folder trial limit but I think that has been increased. Give it try. The link below is to the tutorials page of ZAR. It shows what's available.

Tutorials - using ZAR data recovery

 

[seekermeister]

Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong, but a quick scan of that page makes it appear that those tools are only designed to recover email and images files...? Email would be particularly good, but it doesn't appear that it would work with the client that I use (The Bat!). What I'm trying to recover is a file archive which contained a variety of file types, like .txt, .doc, .mht, .pdf, .gif, .png, etc., etc. I'm not certain exactly what all of the file types may be, because that archive was a general parking place that I used for whatever seemed right at the time.

In any case, will that program let you set a search zone on a drive, or tag what it recovers with the original file names?

 

[carwiz]

You must be looking at a different page. Or maybe just half of the page.

I see full data recovery including partition and RAID 0, 1 and 01. It works with FAT, NTFS and Linux volumes.

You don't set a zone. It will recover the volume and list the file names. You can select individual files if you like. It uses the check-box system of selection. The default is all files. You didn't read any of the tuts, did you.

 

[carwiz]

A question back at ya. How would you know what area of a drive to search? A single file could be spread all the over drive--Unless you just happened to run a defrag just before crashing.
ZAR recovers partitions too, including logical drives. If you want to recover a specific partition, you select it. ZAR analyzes the disk looking for data signatures then evaluates the signatures. It doesn't look for file types. The photo and email recovery are separate functions.

 

[SIW2]

You could try Easeus data recov wizard - it lets you search for file types. You can add your own to the menu.

 

[seekermeister]

A question back at ya. How would you know what area of a drive to search? A single file could be spread all the over drive--Unless you just happened to run a defrag just before crashing.
ZAR recovers partitions too, including logical drives. If you want to recover a specific partition, you select it. ZAR analyzes the disk looking for data signatures then evaluates the signatures. It doesn't look for file types. The photo and email recovery are separate functions.

Again, I may be off in my thinking, but previously the drive had six partitions. The data I need was on the fourth (50GB). The three preceeding it totaled exactly 350GB, so it would appear that the data would have to be between the 350th and the 400th GBs.

If the search area could be narrowed down, that would not only speed up the program's search, it would reduce the amount of file types found tremendously, because when looking for a common file type like .txt, which might be found most anywhere, the number is great. In my case, that one file type numbers 129,891 files, which is ~40% of the 315,718 file found, which makes trying to find the specific files that I need a daunting task.

EDIT: I should add that Disk Recovery 6 doesn't look for specific file types during the search, but it evaluates what is found and groups the files types within a folder tree from which to select from. However the only way to do the selection is to select each file one at a time, so that it appears in the preview pane, and with that many files it is very tedious and time consuming. Since it is likely that all files are not recoverable, one wouldn't know if what they want is available until after completing this chore, which could end up a great waste of time, sweat and tears.

 

[carwiz]

Not a problem for me. Just thought I'd try to help. Hope you find what you need.

 

[seekermeister]

A light flickered on, and I realized that I had most of the files that I needed on my other computer, so I transferred them to my desktop. However, the archive that I transferred from is far from up to date, so there are still some things that I would like to recover. Still, what I did find takes the pressure of the situation.