Know any good free file recovery software?

[snowblizz]

Well so I've misplaced around 100GBs of data. Largely thanks to Windows being stupid. User was completely innocent. Well maybe a little, but there's some weird "bug" or something because sometimes when you try and delete files you just copied it will attempt to delete the whole directory. Unfortunately this time they got me. And it was from a network drive so it went before I could react and no "undo". I was actually busy playing with the WF code at the same time. Multitasking is the devil's invention.

Any suggestions? I basically need to restore an entire folder with everything in it. All data should be there as I shut my other computer off, but since it was after 00:00 I decided it was bedtime first.

[IBBoard]

I'll see if I can dig out the ones that I used once, but the first thing you need to do to make sure that you stand a chance of recovery (which is generally quite good if you just deleted, since that just dereferences it rather than writing over it) is make sure that nothing writes to the disk. Making it read-only (if possible) and hooking it up as a secondary disk on another machine are normally the best ways to protect the data while still being able to recover stuff.


[edit] It isn't the one that I used, but there appears to be quite a good open source NTFS one called NTFS Undelete. Based on its specialism then I suspect success may depend slightly on disk format as well.

I've hunted around and can't actually find a UI that I recognise as the one that I used (unsuccessfully for the files I wanted - but that was because of the delay since I deleted the data and the writes in the mean time), but it looks like there are lots of options. Ones that you can run from a live disk or a different hard disk are obviously better, but I'd just check on places like TuCows and the like for the slightly more trustworthy ones. Just watch out for the ones that'll recover lists of what it can find, but won't actually recover anything until you shell out some money!

[snowblizz]

Found a program and I've gotten about half back. This was on a secondary disk anyway and not my main computer luckily. Annoying though. Because my old computer is claiming one of the disks are failing according to SMART. At least it finds file even though they are zero size so I can see what I've lost and replace it. It has led me to tear apart 2 computers though to try and boo em up before I managed to get the disk read on my main computer. Of course the computer refused to accept an old IDE cable so I had to root around with cables that barely reach where they need to be going.
I guess I'll try the disk that claims to be going to smoke next in my working computer and see if it has anything to say.
It's a bit sad when my ol' reliable from -98 is giving up the lease, since it's replacement has a AMD cpu that basically overheats if too strained.
Luckily it's the week end soon. I just hate stuff like this. I'm about 10 years off when I thought this was interesting. Now I want it to work instead.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, I was in a similar situation when my computer was playing up. I'm hoping my new build will last a while yet, although the HDD probably will be the first thing to go. At least you've got SMART giving you warnings - most Windows users won't even get that and so won't get the advanced warning. Hopefully you can recover what you're missing