I really thought I had lost all of my personal data that I’ve been saving up since I first started using personal computers some 15+ years ago. Not that I had much files of great importance at that time. Everything was on a dead 500 gb Seagate hard drive, and I had a backup of my stuff on a 500 gb external hard drive. The funny thing about all this was that I accidentally deleted the backup on the external drive … prior to the Seagate internal drive ending up dead. I couldn’t get the Seagate disk to boot. Sometimes it started to spin when put under power, most of the time it didn’t. So the only solution was to find a program that could recover my deleted files on the external drive.
First up was Recuva. Recuva could find my lost files, but when it tried recovering them, it stopped after about 8 gigabytes. And nothing more.
So, on to the next one: PC Inspector File Recovery. Everything went well, it could see the deleted files on the drive, and started recovering them. And then the program crashed. Sigh.
Third in line was Undelete Plus, and even tough I had to let it run all night, the next morning I had all of my files back! So thank you TouchStone Software!
Three freeware programs, three different results. But in the end all was good.