What's the best hard drive recovery software?

by Sally
(USA)

Question: I'm really frustrated. I have FOUR external hard drives to hold all my video footage, plus photos and documents. They are all G-Raids.

I have to say that two of the drives (the oldest ones) have lasted for many years without any problems. But the biggest drive (1 TB) has now crashed twice. The last time this happend I took the drive to the Mac repair shop and they charged $100 to recover the files. I'm now taking things into my own hands and looking into downloading recovery software.

What's the best/cheapest way to recover the files on an external hard drive? Any suggestions for software?

Desktop Documentaries: Having a hard drive crash is very frustrating (and devastating if the files are lost). The only software we have personal experience with is DATA RESCUE. It's $99 and worked great for us -- recovered all our files like brand new!

Another one I've heard good things about is DISC WARRIOR.

At one point we tested out VIRTUAL LAB DATA RECOVERY which worked great during the test scan, but once we saw the $150.00 price tag (for 1000 GB recovery --- it's less money for smaller amounts of data), we decided to go with DATA RESCUE 3.

A great place to start your search for data recovery software is CNET in the download section.

Once you make your choice for software, it's a simple click of the button to download the software to your computer and within minutes you can begin scanning your corrupted/broken hard drive to see if the files can be recovered. I recommend doing a "test scan" before purchasing the software to make sure the files/data can be recovered.

Need more space to hold all that HD video footage?
Learn more about External Hard Drives.

What is YOUR experience with hard drives and data recovery. Please share below.

Comments for What's the best hard drive recovery software?

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Jan 28, 2014

PhotoRec NEW
by: Anonymous

I have had good experience using PhotoRec which is a free, yet powerful recovery software. It is not the easiest piece of software to use but with a bit of playing about you can get great results.

Jul 25, 2012

space on your drive NEW
by: Desktop Documentaries

Sally, one other thing I thought I'd mention here. If your hard drive keeps crashing, one question I have is "how much" data are you putting on the drive? Sometimes maxing out the space will cause a hard drive to crash. So if you have a 1TB drive, try not to put more than, say, 800 GB on it.

Something to think about for future reference.

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