In your zeal to delete your data, you may have accidentally deleted files that you wanted to keep. Lifehacker has posted this handy list of data recovery tools to help you get those files back.
As you may know, whenever you delete a file, the only thing that changes is the file system. The data of the deleted file is still on the hard drive, but the file system sees the space containing the file as “blank” writable space. Data recovery software typically looks into the directory where the file was stored and scans it, finding any files not listed in the file system.
The program you choose for this task will not only be determined by your OS, but also by the specifics of your recovery needs. Do you need to recover a single file? Many files? A whole hard drive? An unbootable drive? A really scratched optical disk? Specialized tools for all of these needs are available, and this article will help you find the right program for yours.
hack?
I keep it @ TestDisk.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
One of the fastest programs I tested, but a little bit hard in use, for simple file recovering you might be better of with something ells. But when your hard disk is wiped… this is the tool you need.
My girlfriend, somehow, unlinked about 20gb of digital photos from her Macbook Pro filesystem the other day.
I suspect removing the harddrive from that thing, had I documented it, would have been more “hack” worthy than this particular article, but its a timely resource for me, since I’ve gotta try and recover the data now.
On the other hand, I’m sure I’ll see this article pop up on my Digg feed shortly.
Oh.. wait.. I know how to google, and already have the relevant tools mentioned in the article after the 15 minutes of preparation I took before I opened the computer. Lifehacker has always struck me as the antithesis of Hack a Day.
no hack no care
Wasn’t there a rule that a hack should be fun to do?
So… in the process of undeleting, why not create some hardlinks on a FAT16 partition or something.
If you find yourself yearning for hack-a-day “classic”, change your bookmark to:
http://www.hackaday.com/category/daily/
Or for the rss feed:
http://www.hackaday.com/category/daily/rss.xml
Yeah, I know it’s not fun to have to change your personal habits, but it’s way easier than trying to get hackaday to change.
NOT A HACK
This is good for accidently deleting files, but I had my IBM 75 GXP crash (like everyone else), and I was able to get my files back for free using ntfs reader. It took forever, and chopped off files names, but it worked. I wrote about my experience here.
http://www.squidoo.com/Hard_Drive_Data_Recovery
Now, I backup all my files online.
Not a hack but still useful..