Data recover is a huge business, with many specialized companies offering some of the best data recovery techniques available. These specialized companies who offer data recovery can often recover data in all but the worst scenarios but can come at quite a hefty price tag. Depending on the drive in question, home data recovery software can do an amazing job at recovering any data you may have lost.
Why Do You Need Recovery
The biggest differentiating factor between data that is recoverable at home, or data that needs to be recovered by specialists, is how the data was lost. There are a few cases in which data recovery should be left to the experts.
- Physical damage – if the drive has received physical damage to a point, it is no longer recognized by a computer, data recovery software will be of no help. Experts have specialized tooling to replace control boards or mechanical hard drive readers, tooling that is just not feasible for the average person to own. If your drive has suffered extensive physical damage, it’s often best no to try recovery at home, as there is a chance you could damage the drive more.
- Unrecognizable – Windows explorer may not show drives that have a bad sector or are faulty in some way, the built-in disk utility “Disk Management” will still recognize that the drive is present. If Disk Management is not able to recognize the drive, there is likely physical damage which will not be recoverable at home.
While the experts are great at what they do, there are some situations in which you can recover the data at home.
- Accidental format – accidentally formatting the wrong memory card, USB, or hard drive is bound to happen at some point when using multiple devices. Fortunately, accidental formatting is one of the best cases to use recovery software at home. A simple format relies on removing the address tables, and not actually removing the data. This makes space for new data to overwrite the previously saved data. If you have not overwritten with new data yet, the previous data on the freshly formatted drive should still be recoverable.
- Data corruption –data corruption is all too common on older hardware, and can leave you in a situation where the whole drive is inaccessible due to a small part being corrupted. While the corrupted sectors themselves may not always be recoverable, even by experts, home recovery software will allow you to recover everything else on the drive.
The Software To Use
There are a lot of programs that allow you to do easy data recovery at home, however, not all are up to the same standard. The main reason people want to try home data recovery is the high costs of professional data recovery services, making the expensive recovery software over the top for a normal person. You don’t want to have to spend your Crypto casino wins on data recovery if you can help it.
Fortunately, there are a few free pieces of data recovery software which can do an amazing job at recovering your data. Diskdrill, Recuva, Minitool Power Data Recovery and Stellar are all great data recovery software for varying degrees of experience.