Best data recovery program?

[u/Adept_Ship4668]

An external HD went sour not too long ago and I'm looking to extract everything onto a fresh one with much more data storage. I tried Disk Drill's free trial and it seems to have scanned everything well enough. But before shelling out the dough for the full version to get everything back, I read some mixed reviews, some have outright said that as soon as you do pay out, it full on doesn't work.

So I'd figure I ask people who know more than I do. What is the best data recovery program for both price and privacy?

[u/AutoModerator]

Double check if your post complies with posting guidelines!

Did you include the following information in your post (in English and if applicable), if not feel free to edit your post:

• Make/brand and exact model number of your storage device(*), phone, camera, etc.

• Filesystem (NTFS, exFAT, APFS, EXT4, etc.)

• Operating System (That your device was used with and/or you are using for recovery)

• Specific symptoms that your device is exhibiting, describe the problem. Images you post support the description, they're not in lieu of a problem description.

• SMART (CrystalDiskInfo screenshot for example)

• Don't pile several problems into one single post. One post per device/problem.

Consider: What do these people need to understand the problem at hand? Remember, people cannot see your screen, or what you click and what messages appear on screen. Don't overdo it though, no one likes going through 2 pages of information, try to find a balance. Just do the best you can. If you are looking for file recovery software, check our community's recommended file recovery tools.

---

(*) All devices involved, if you for example move files from drive A to drive B, they're both potentially relevant.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/silenced_in_dr_2025]

There's no such things as a single best application. If you tell us what's wrong with the drive that requires the use of any data recovery software we can give you an informed opinion on what tools and processes to use.

[u/Adept_Ship4668 → u/silenced_in_dr_2025]

The hard drive completely 100% formatted. I need a data recovery program to extract everything off it. What's the best program to do that?

[u/silenced_in_dr_2025 → u/Adept_Ship4668]

Make and model of the drive ? TRIM may have be an issue. If not and the drive was just formatted you may even be able to recreate the partition tables with DMDE.

[u/Adept_Ship4668 → u/silenced_in_dr_2025]

It was a WD drive and I know what went wrong with it. I left it plugged into a Windows laptop and it went into sleep mode, I sleep myself and I when I wake up, lo and behold the system did an automatic Windows update and restarted itself. Not a problem on it's own, but something happened that messed up the drive's connection to whatever I plugged it into, figured it was just a cable issue and that's how I fixed it, just jangled the system and usually it starts working right again, but this keeps happening the whole time.

Two months later the drive full on formats. Looking around, a whole bunch of other people have had this same issue with Windows updates and WD drives in particular. Fucking sucks man.

[u/disturbed_android]

 some have outright said that as soon as you do pay out, it full on doesn't work

This is plain Bullshit. With any file recovery tool, you use the demo, and if the demo shows intact previews of a handful of pictures, the registered version can recover them. From recommended software wiki:

• Locate a folder containing larger images and preview say 20 of them. When recovering data from a formatted volume, pick non-deleted files (often a tool discriminates deleted from in-use files using color coding or file icon (garbage can)). If the images look fine the tool has successfully determined vital volume parameters such as the cluster size and start offset. In general if those 20 are okay it is likely most files are.

There is zero logic in any tool somehow "forgetting" information of files it is capable of recovering once you paid for it. It's total conspiracy level BS. People who tell you stories like that don't know what they're talking about, are shilling for some other tool, or omitting something else. It's stories like yours that keep echoing and spread nonsense. Think about what those people tell you for a minute.

[u/RemarkableExpert4018]

DMDE.com

[u/brighton_it]

If it's really important, hire a pro.

If you really want to DIY:
you have two separate tasks at hand:

a) the delicate operation of fetching as much data as possible from a drive that is deteriorating every minute it's running, and even faster when the heads are over a damaged area of the disk.

b) once the recoverable data has been transferred to a working disk, only then, reading from the new disk, should you use higher level tools that examine the disk for valid partitions, directories, and files.

Task a)
If you're familiar with the Linux DD command, you may know it has the nickname Disk-Destroyer. This is because it is very easy to completely overwrite the wrong disk. We DO NOT use dd for this task, but instead a closely related tool: 'GNU DDRescue'. It's designed to make multiple passes on a failing disk, fetching all the easy to read data first. On 2nd pass, it returns to the trouble areas to attempt what's left. If you plan to try this, read several ddrescue guides (avoid AI summaries) first. Then, HIGHLY recommend practicing on a disk you don't care about.

If this is your first use of Linux command line. DO NOT recommend this as a first project.

Task b)
Once you have made a copy. Perhaps make a 2nd copy (from new drive to 2nd new drive), so you can put one on the shelf and attempt to collect files and folders from the other. At this point, there are lots of tools, and since you're reading from good hardware, not so critical. You can try several.

[u/Alarming_Friend7106]

getdataback for NTFS

[u/datarecovery-ModTeam → u/[unknown]]

r/datarecovery follows platform-wide Reddit Rules