Data Recovery Done Free–Or Nearly Free

Recently I was talking to a friend who has written several books. Her computer had just died, and she was scrambling to find ways to recover files from her hard drive, which stored many files relevant to her books. I mentioned the California-based company DriveSavers to her and she ended up getting all her files restored and placed on a new disk through them. (They’ve done the same thing for a number of celebrity clients and restored drives from demolished computers.) Especially in cases where your disk has a problem, but isn’t totally trashed, it’s good to have disk recovery tools on hand, and in addition to the Norton-type products, several free or nearly free applications can rescue you in a pinch.



Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier is a free file recovery application I’ve had success with, and it comes in a Windows version and a Linux version. It recovers files from physically damaged disks and allows you to easily copy files from disks with bad sectors, scratches, or unexplained errors. The application includes logging features so that you can see if you are getting a pristine copy of a damaged file.

R-Studio Data Recovery is another good program to try in the event of disaster, or just isolated disk errors. It costs $49.95, but you can get it for a free trial and unless you need data recovery on a regular basis, that’s probably good enough. In addition to good recovery features, R-Studio has a set of useful undelete features. Whenever I use these, I’m surprised at how files I thought were deleted completely are often still hanging around.

On the Mac, OnBelay Data Recovery for Mac has a good reputation, although I have yet to experience any drive failures on my Macs. It restores files from many different types of storage media, and it’s $29.95—much less expensive than many of the data recovery titles.

Do you know of any good free or nearly free data recovery tools?

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