Data recovery software

What data recovery software does everyone reccomend? We have found increased need for the purchase of this type of software, and I'm looking for some help on finding the best programs available.

Idealy, we'd like software that can work over the network without installing software on each computer.

We would like to have the option of running off of floppy disk drive as a backup measure.


Obviously software that can effectvely recover lost/deleted data would in a necessity.

I'm not too worried about being able to recover fdisked partitions, but it would be a nice benefit.

Cost is another issue, I doubt the higher-ups will approve any software that costs several hundred dollars.

Any help out there?

I have used easy recovery to good effect wow, that got expensive quick!!

This one is much cheaper but I have never used it.

i have used "ahem" Ontrack before and I must say, it is brilliant software.

Just my 2 penny's

While I like the Ontrack software, I'm really looking for something that will work over a network or through floppy drive. The thing is, when you install software such as Ontrack, you run a high risk of overwriting the files that you are attempting to undelete. It's kinda catch 22 situation. :)

PowerQuest Lost And Found is pretty slick...it's a set of floppies so no worries on that point! From my experience, best thing is to hook up another HD to it and dump all the files from the old HD to it...best way to go at it! It works pretty good...

The one I seem to have the best luck with is Tiramisu. You can boot from floppy and run the program. It also alllows you to specify specific files: i.e. *.doc, *.dll, *.exe etc. If you have a hard drive, you can even recover data after it has been formatted.

A less expensive solution, and one that fits easily on floppy *less than 200K* is SpinRite from Gibson Research Labs However it lacks the network features you seem interested in. Spinrite is what we use in the labs to recover data from drives (HD's Floppies, Zip, Jaz) with bad/unreadable clusters, both software reported and in hardware.
I highly recommend SpinRite, I've pulled data off drives everyone has given up on with it.

We do use some Ontrack stuff, some Norton stuff as well

spinrite is fantastic - its incredibly thorough, however this means a 10 gig drive will take 30-40 hours....

I've used Ontrack and Powerquest successfully in the past also, and have even saved some techs' jobs with it. :p

SpinRite as a recovery tool would be more applicable in disaster recovery instances, IMHO, but it's reputation is golden.

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Originally posted by InTheWayBoy
PowerQuest Lost And Found is pretty slick...it's a set of floppies so no worries on that point! From my experience, best thing is to hook up another HD to it and dump all the files from the old HD to it...best way to go at it! It works pretty good...

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Yea, but that dosn't help me much with laptops. :D :D

Well, with a laptop you should unplug the HD, get a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE convertor, and then run your software of choice...don't know where to order them but they aren't that expensive...

Quote:

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Originally posted by InTheWayBoy
Well, with a laptop you should unplug the HD, get a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE convertor, and then run your software of choice...don't know where to order them but they aren't that expensive...

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Unfortunately, there's a big difference between what I SHOULD do and what my company WANTS me to do. I'd really like to have a seperate computer with ZIP and a CD Burner with one of those 2.5 to 3.5 ide converters, but unfortunately, that's not gonna happen. At least not at this company. I'm really lucky I can even think about getting this software, but I think I've finally convinced them the necessity is there. We'll see what they say when I start showing them some prices. :) Thanks for all the help everyone.

Hey Qt maybe you want to include some quotes off of the professional data recovery places. Kind of show them the alternative. Maybe the software won't always be able to help but just one or two times and you're talking a big savings over taking it to one of those places. It cost one of my customers $1000 to recover the 100 or so MB of pictures of his son being born. ( Poor guy was in the process of putting them on cd when he got power surged that took out most of his computer.. i think the floppy and one card lived. ) That isn't on the high side of the estimates on professional data recovery either!!!