Happy Holidays Everyone!

Here’s a post on what you should do to recover lost data. From our Killersites Community Forum!

Disaster Recovery

So anyone lose data? I know you’re out there and likely more of you will.

In our case my wife had issues and then the OS would not start and we were offered a recovery service…Oooops… it was not an OS fix it was a factory settings recovery. HP builds in a partition with this ability. I always delete it, my wife did not. So it overwrote all her data in separate partitions I had created and restored the computer to one partition and lots of junk programs.

Aside from Data, my wife is a photographer and lost almost 10,000 images of the last 4 years. Ouch!

So I take charge (she is a wreck at this point) and visit my old friends at Snapfiles where I start studying recovery programs and choose one that sounds right and got 5 stars from them and 5 from users. Its name is Recuva. It is Freeware, easy to use and figure out in a hurry. It recovered (as far as we can tell) all of her photos off the disk, about 10,000 from our flight from Germany 2006 to a photo of my daughter and some brown bears from last week. Granted, all 10,000 are in one folder so she will have to sort through them all… but heh! It also can recover images from digital camera cards or video cameras as well as of course… written data. It blew me away for a Freeware. NOTE: it will recover what you tell it to or everything. So say images, it gave us all her photos, but also every dash, button, graphic, background found on her PC from every program, game etc. Bit of a mess that, but small price to pay.

Of course if you have a camera you know each time you empty it the name/number scheme repeats, you have duplicate names (likely in different folders) so now you have a mess. Enter SnapFiles with AllDup, again pretty easy to figure out and a 5 star freeware. It allowed me to specify folders, set up filters like all images have DSC in them, then it lists the image name and as a tree, all images found and where they are. In the case of images you can click on each and a side window will show you the image so you can compare. Then mark which images and choose to delete, trash, rename or move to another folder as you wish.

So I strongly suggest Snapfiles (snapfiles.com/freeware/) for your freeware needs, if you need it they likely have it as well as payware. And for disaster Recovery: AllDup and Recuva.

Oh, and check out there Back up programs like DriveImage XL so you don’t need those above and a external hard drive would be nice too, they are pretty cheap these days.

Written by: Kyle (LSW)

You can take a look and get involved with the original post and discussions here!

Thanks,

Jody
Killersites.com