Right before I left for Portland, I was moving some files around on my USB hard drive, and I noticed something was wacked, like 100 GB was in use, but I couldn’t see any files! They had disappeared.
Well today I finally got around to recovering the files. I tried 3-4 different products at first. All of them let you download a demo and see what you can recover. The one I have used before – OnTrack – doesn’t even work on Vista, so that was out the window.
I finally came across one called GetDataBack. It showed EVERYTHING that I was missing. The others showed partials or not even some folders I had, just weird. GetDataBack is nice too, once you do a scan and it finds everything, you can save that recovery session, close the program, and come back, and you don’t have to rescan everything again. My scan took 3.5 hours to complete, so this was a nice feature.
The hardest part about everything is just moving data around, I didn’t have enough free space on my main drive to restore everything at once, so I had to restore some, and then move it over the network to my other machine, then go back and restore more, rinse, repeat.
GetDataBack set me back 70$, but it was worth it to get all my music, documents and photos back. I can tell you this, once I am done moving everything around, I am backing up everything online.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 
5 replies on “Data Recovery – Where Did My Files Go?”
Do you mean backup “online” as in on the internet? What service do you use for that? I’d worry that someday the site would vanish – along with my data!
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yeah online. Probably carbonite backup. Pictures, I use flickr, but I might just do redundancy as well. I did try mp3tunes for my music, but their sync tool is flakey.
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Never had much success with that software. I tried this other one from CBL data recovery and it worked for me. Only $40.
JT
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Hah, nice. I’m a fan of GetDataBack as well. It’s the best out there from what I have tried. I recovered files from a few failed hard drives to SD cards that were emerged in water and didn’t work otherwise (don’t ask). Good stuff.
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I’ve used GetDataBack for years it works great and you don’t do it online.
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