What's a good freeware file recovery program?

[DTS]

What's a good freeware file recovery program?

I got PC Inspector File Recovery cause it was rated good on Cnet, but the recovered files had errors in them.

I only just deleted the original files, and I haven't written much to my HD since then, so it's not likely overwritten, so the files should be recoverable quite easily without errors, right?

[^misantropia^]

I only just deleted the original files, and I haven't written much to my HD since then, so it's not likely overwritten, so the files should be recoverable quite easily without errors, right?

If no sectors have been overwritten yet. File recovery is not black magic, so if this program can't reconstruct the complete file, chances are other programs won't be able to, either.

[Foo]

You can test your current program:
Delete a small file you dont care about, deliberately.
Immediately try to recover the file

If it recovers successfully you've proved the program works. Meaning there's something wrong with the files you're trying to recover.

What kind of files are they, you could also do a partial recovery and manually repair the file depending on the file type and your ability level.

Also, if the hard drive is your operating system drive, and you're online surfing the net or doing anything else, you're going to be using the drive for temp internet files and the swap file... so regardless of whether you've written anything specific to the drive, things are still being written and deleted all the time.

[DTS]

The files I'm trying to recover are rar files. The first rar file that was recovered Winrar said had an error in it, I tried to repair it with Winrar but in the repaired rar file, files from elsewhere turned up, aswell as an error message coming up again.

So I thought it was clear that the file recovery program had recovered the file wrong.

This was before posting this topic.

Just now I tested the program like you said and it works.

You said that means there's something wrong with the files I'm trying to recover, well they didn't have the error before I deleted them. The file recovery program said that their condition was "good". The file I deleted and immediately tried to recover had the same condition listed, so there isn't a higher one for the program.

[dzjepp]

Try this http://www.recuva.com/

[+JuggerNaut+]

Try this http://www.recuva.com/

Recuva (pronounced "recover")...

:icon27:

[dzjepp]

for you

[DTS]

Try this http://www.recuva.com/

I tried that and it didn't find the files I'm trying to recover.

I tried the program I was using before, to see if the files hadn't just been overwritten too many times now. That program doesn't find the files anymore either. So it looks like the files have been overwritten too many times now. So they're not recoverable it seems

Or is there some program that will do it?

[dzjepp]

That's probably part of the "too much overwriting" hence the errors. At this point I'd say it's too late

[Foo]

Try this http://www.recuva.com/

I tried that and it didn't find the files I'm trying to recover.

I tried the program I was using before, to see if the files hadn't just been overwritten too many times now. That program doesn't find the files anymore either. So it looks like the files have been overwritten too many times now. So they're not recoverable it seems

Or is there some program that will do it?

There is no 'too many times'. Being overwritten once, even partially, renders a file unrecoverable or corrupted. Some of the better file recovery programs can attempt repairs on specific formats of file, but none of them will pull out data that's been overwritten already on the disk. Some of them will even inspect the file you're trying to recover and compare it to your swapfile and other files to see if it can find a complete copy by munging together 2 different locations. But programs that good aren't free.

The myth that data is recoverable once it's been overwritten does have a small amount of truth to it - it may be possible by manual inspection of the disk platter by removing it from the hard drive. But the hard drive itself has absolutely no method to achieve this, so it doesn't matter what program you use if the data has been overwritten.

[Wakeley]

If nothing helps you out then you can look out for Stellar Phoenix File Recovery software uses powerful algorithms to recover deleted/lost files after instances ranging from accidentally formatting the hard disk to emptying the Recycle Bin to files deleted after a virus attack.
File Recovery Software scans every sector of your storage media for the lost files that you wish to recover and displays them in a tree according to the file type. The recovery software scans the drive in raw mode and can locate the files without the aid of file system data structures.
Although its not a free-ware but gives you the option to download the demo version which shows you the recovered data.
Download the demo version from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/file-recovery-software.htm