Best Data Recovery Software

There must be a thousand different companies offering data recovery software. I have tested at least half of them. what surprised me was that so many of these did not even work. They could not even find the drive I was trying to recover files on. So when we discuss the best data recovery software the list is actually quite short. There are around six programs that truly are effective for data recovery. The best data recovery program I have ever found and used is Disk Doctors Data Recovery Software. These programs far exceed the ability of the others ion their class. They are faster and are capable of restoration of corrupted and damaged files as well as simply deleted data.

Physical Crash Recovery – A Challenge

There could be various reasons for physical damage of the storage media. Some of the most common are:

• Hard drive mechanical failures which includes motor failures, head crash
• Tapes not working due to mishandling, tape media having dust
• CD or DVD’s having their metallic media or the dye scratched
• Electronic failure of the hard drive where PCB gets burnt
• BAD sectors
• Weakening of magnetic media of the hard drive platters, causing low data retention power (for e.g. you created a partition and when you boot, the drive looses the information.
• Track 0 bad

Almost all major physical damages repair of storage media is far beyond the expertise of an end user. To effectively repair a hard drive or any other complex mechanical component, special tools and environment (Clean room, such as class 100) is required. Even if the user is able to get all the major components or software, repair of the media is mostly difficult, as it requires lot of expertise.

Often I’ve heard people trying extreme bizarre techniques such as freezing the drive (to overcome heating problem), spinning the drive or dropping the drive to a soft surface from less height (To ease the jamming of the platters). As far as professional data recovery methods are concerned, these methods are complete “no”. Instead of getting to some solution, they might cause additional loss of data or even permanent data loss.

Simplified physical recovery technique

Recovery from a damaged storage media, such as hard drive (IDE, SCSI, SATA, SAS or FC) requires various hit and trial methods, but most of them never affects the actual data. The recovery process starts from the diagnosis of the media and then figuring out the cause of the failure. Once the cause is known, professionals starts replacing the damaged component which is similar to transplantation in a human body for e.g. damaged head transplantation, spindle motor replacement etc.

When media starts working it is not sure for how long it might provide access of the data, so the first thing which becomes essential is to clone the drive or to create a sector by sector image of this drive.

Once the image has been created, drive is analyzed for any logical corruption. In most of the cases there is no need for any special tool to repair the damage as mostly the file system and the data is intact as major recovery job has been performed by repairing it. If there is a logical corruption then special tools is required to recover lost files from the cloned drive or image file.

Severe logical corruption recovery technique

Another method of file system recovery when there is a severe file system corruption and no information is available about file system attributes. These file system attributes helps to figure out file location and directory hierarchy.

Special tools designed provides a strategy which involves scanning the drive completely and tagging important file system structures such as sub-directory structures in FAT file system when drive has been formatted before that “deltree” command was also used. In such cases it is impossible to identify the root folder of each file type.

These special tool helps to create a virtual root entry and starts plugging in the sub-directory entries, which eventually extracts the data out of the hard drive to another healthy partition or a drive.

Disk Doctors Labs Inc. is the most wide spread and the global leader who provides professional data recovery services.