A coworker asked today for a recommendation for disk recovery software. Did all the data on your hard drive disappear because of a serious disk error? Is all your data gone? Maybe not. Don’t panic. I lost all of my data a few months ago. I tried a number of different trial versions of programs (downloaded something like 6 or 7 from tucows) and the one that I found to be the best and ended up buying was Handy Recovery:
Before you buy it, you can run it in a trial mode, where it will show you what it thinks it can recover – for me, this was everything that I can tell. Of all the programs I tried, it ran the fastest and showed the most comprehensive view of what it could recover. Oddly enough, it also happened to be the cheapest of the ones I looked at. Keep in mind that you will need another hard drive to restore to. It is not recommended to restore to the damaged drive, because even if the drive is good, a failed recovery could make things worse. A USB drive enclosure may come in handy for moving a failed drive to another machine that is bootable.