Today I deleted about 1GB of MP3 files. It was a mistake! The file explorer I use (Opus) did something odd when I used it’s UNDO command. The result was that 1GB of data I was preparing to burn to CDs was gone. Needless to say, it was not in the trash can / recycle folder.
There are many applications promoted on the Internet for unerasing / undeleting / recovering lost and deleted data and files. As I already have a few recovery tools on hand I decided to try them first. The line-up was: O&O DiskRecovery and Runtime Software GetDataBack (for NTFS). I have these tools on hand for drive recovery. I had never used them, until now, for undeleting files although both will perform this task quite happily.
O&O DiskRecovery
DiskRecovery found the data I wanted. I was able to set it to only look for deleted MP3 files (which is what I was searching for). All the files were found yet there was no filename information. Each file was going to be named something like FILE000001.MP3, FILE000002.MP3, etc. It also did not recover the folder structure (I had these files sorted into folders relative to the album they were each from). As I was dealing with a few hundred MP3 files, this level of recovery was not very appealing. If I went ahead with using this tool for my recovery operation I would have to spent many hours renaming every file and resorting them into folders. No thanks.
Had there been a whole lot of other MP3 files recently deleted from this disk many of the files O&O presented me with would have been stuff I didn’t want…yet I would have no easy way of knowing what was what. I would have had to recover the whole lot and then listen to each file in an MP3 player to try and figure out what I do and don’t want to keep. Double no thanks…
On to the next tool…
GetDataBack (for NTFS)
GDB performed a much more thorough data/disk analysis. I could see it was calling up all the existing and backup file allocation tables, and the like. The net result is that it presented me with a complete directory structure of the entire disk. I was able to browse to the exact folder I had deleted. I could then see all the deleted sub-folders sitting there with a line crossing them out (to indicate they are in a deleted state). I highlighted the folders and copied them to another drive. Voila. Problem solved.
Using GetDataBack I undeleted all my files, and it kept the file names and folder structure completely intact. Excellent.
GetDataBack is also great for recovering data from drives that have crashed. Click here to read my article on this.
LINKS:
GetDataBack - www.runtime.org
O&O DiskRecovery - www.oo-software.com
It is good to see some semi-documented results from the use of data recovery tools. I have not had the opportunity to use either of the ones that you have mentioned, but I have however made use of StompSoft’s Recover Lost Data several times and have been quite pleased with the results and the format that they were presented. Perhaps you may give this one a try and see how it measures up to the two that you’ve used so far.