Undelete Utilities

I helped recover some lost files this weekend for some friends.

• A DVD-R Disk - Corrupted as additional files where added to it.
• The files where being copied from a USB Pen drive - it also was corrupted
• The original files where cut and paste onto the pen drive, so they were in effect "deleted" from the source drive

These where the utilities which seemed to work best.

Photorec for getting to the Pen Drive Contents - Free (I possibly could have just ran a check disk in windows initially, but I wanted to start with some specialized software first). No GUI just text based but it worked.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

IsoBuster for getting to the DVD-R Contents - $29 (Very nice software. No other software I tested worked at all for this - free or commercial.)
http://www.isobuster.com/isobuster.php

Recuva - For Recovering Large Numbers of deleted files by directory or file type off of the second hard drive - Free (Other programs didn't let you select the file type, or the folder).
http://www.recuva.com/

We also removed the IDE hard drive from the system where the files had been deleted, put it in a external USB IDE Hard Drive enclosure, so we were not writing/booting off of it. Then I attached it to my laptop computer and ran the recovery software from there. This is quick/easy way to attempt various software recovery techniques without degrading the lost files more.


This is the list of software I was testing with http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/datarecovery.shtml