Both applications are part of a single download. These program work in tandem to give you a full recovery suite that non-free programs provide. Testdisk and Photorecįor our free and open source options, I used TestDisk and Photorec.

We'll show you examples of each but no matter the method you choose, neither will be as costly as paying a professional to recover your data.

Many of them allow you to download the product for free to see if the program will be able to detect any partitions or data before you buy and then unlock the necessary components to actually allow you to get your data. There are also utilities that give you a nice graphical interface that makes recovery of data as painless as possible, for a fee. In fact, I even advise against powering down the system unless absolutely necessary. It's very important to assess the situation as prudently as possible before acting. I can't say how many times someone has come to me to recover a partition or data, only to find out that a forced disk check, copying new files to the partition, or switching to a new machine has caused permanent unrecoverable damage to the files.

Well, not until at the very least you can assess that the device truly has a damaged partition.

Here's how!įirst rule about data recovery and fixing disk partitions is that you do NOT want to make any changes to the environment, the disk in question, the partition, etc. Luckily, I used some recovery tools, both free and paid, to not only fix my partition, but to also get my data back onto another redundant networked attached storage array called a Synology Diskstation (opens in new tab).

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