Over the last two weeks I’ve had cause to use a free tool to try and recover data from corrupt storage media. The first time it was an SD card (not mine) and the second time (today) it was the 160gb primary HDD on a laptop (also not mine). In both instances the owners of these devices had no backup of the data stored. This is almost understandable in the case of the SD card (unless you have dual slots on your camera) but not so understandable in the case of the laptop owner who had no backups but all of their baby pics on the now un-bootable and corrupt drive….oops! I think we all know the lesson here…BACKUP and BACKUP again (this person has learnt the hard way).
The main thrust of this post though is the software which has on both occasions saved the day without much fuss or effort….I urge everyone to bookmark the PhotoRec CGSecurity site. This free tool does not look pretty (nor does the website/wiki) but it is VERY good and not that complicated to use. Although the product is called PhotoRec it actually recovers most common file types (docs, music, movies, executables etc). If you are trying to recover data from a corrupt primary HDD you’ll obviously need a liveCD or recovery disk and an external drive of some type to both run the software from and recover the files but it’s still a pretty easy task and well worth it to get back that amount of data.
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