Some excellent tools for data recovery

Nowadays, there are many tools and programs on the market to assist you with data recovery. While there’s no end of data recovery tool packages out there, most of them are primarily designed to reclaim data from system drives. In this roundup, I look at the following six packages in terms of how well they recover data from mobile storage such as flash drives and memory cards: CardRecovery, PhotoRec, Recover My Files, Recuva, Remo Recover and Undelete 360.

As data storage components get larger and cheaper, people easier trust large amounts of data to them. It’s also much easier to mistakenly erase data or have them hiccup on you. And if you’re in the habit of holding on to that data for too long – for example, not transferring photos from your camera’s memory card – disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?

Undelete 360 worked best when dealing with recently deleted files, but anything more ambitious than that (e.g., quick-formatted media) was beyond it. CardRecovery’s biggest limitation was the limited range of file types it handles: It’s designed mainly to recover files created by cameras and almost nothing else.

Recover My Files may be costly, but I liked its tunable scan function; its professional-level support for devices like RAID drives may come in handy. Remo Recover is functionally similar to Recover My Files, but it turned up a high number of false positives during testing.

The biggest surprise was how two of the best programs cost nothing to use. While PhotoRec was the least novice-friendly – its text-only interface could scare off the uninitiated and its documentation is spotty – it was also one of the most powerful. Recuva was likewise quite strong and wasn’t lacking any functionality in its free version.

However when you’re not ready to take a leap of faith with one of these programs, it doesn’t hurt to ask for help. There are several free diagnostic services available.

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