Being a computer repair business owner I know all too well how frequently customers lose their personal data. I also know all too well the costs involved with data recovery. It’s quite expensive and it puts customers into an awkward predicament. How much is that picture of little Johnny worth? Some people will pay thousands of dollars to have data recovery done on a hard drive. But what if customers could do their own data recovery? Is there free data recovery software available for download?
The answer is yes! Free data recovery software does exist. However, it’s really hard find the right program. Most of the popular free data recovery programs really are not free. They are free to download and free to use. However, once the scan is complete, the only way a customer can actually retrieve their data is after paying for a software license. Granted, the cost for a software license is much less than paying someone to perform data recovery; however, it’s not really as advertised. Free!
There is a TRUE free data recovery software program that I use. It’s a little tricky to learn how to use it, but once you become proficient with it, using the program to recover data is fairly easy. The free data recovery software that I use is a program call TestDisk. Using this program I am able to fix partition tables, recover deleted partitions, recover FAT32 boot sectors from its backup, rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sectors, fix FAT tables, rebuild NTFS boot sectors, recover NTFS boot sectors from its backup, fix MFT using MFT mirrors, undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystems, and copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.
All in all, TestDisk is an amazing and free data recovery software application that truly works. Like I said though, it can be tricky to learn, and making a mistake can actually make recovering the data impossible even for a professional. So if you are interested in learning how to use TestDisk, I recommend experimenting with some spare hard drives you might have laying around the house or office. Also, I recommend copying and printing the manual so that you can absorb as much of the instructions as possible. The manual is actually well written. It progresses you through various scenarios as opposed to explaining a complete list of commands. The scenarios are very common and occur the most.
Once again, if you are looking for free data recovery software, don’t fall for all the other programs tricks. Most lie about the software being free. Most make you pay in order to retrieve your recovered data. TestDisk is open source and truly free. Your only challenge is learning how to use it. Which isn’t hard as long as your patient and willing to do so.