With Windows thinking it'd be funny to trick me into wiping my data backup to use as a repair disk, and then overwriting my main data drive with a new copy of Windows 10 no one asked it to do, I was in dire need of some recovery software to at least attempt to salvage my data.
Recovery Software
I had never really looked into this before. I was only partially aware that it could even be done in theory, but it turns out there's a fair few bits of software out there for this. Some better than others of course.
My first point of call was to use the free software Recuva. I ran it in quick-mode first time find that it found a bunch of Windows related files (no doubt from Windows being installed on top of my data). I launched a deep scan and continued researching online. I found people saying that Recuva takes far too long and only recovers some data and not all file formats. With it still running and saying it would take around 8 hours to complete, I went to the highest rated paid software: Stellar Data Recovery.
Running this took about half the time and threw up results it could show me on its interface as it was going. Recuva was simply a loading bar, giving no indication that it was indeed finding things. Stellar's interface also has a preview ability to look at image files on the fly. I did notice very few of them would preview, but figured this was because it was still scanning at the time.
Stellar finished it's scan, as did Recuva. Stellar did find a lot more, and I had more trust in it purely because I could see what it was finding along the way. Despite this, exporting found data from both ran into the same issue. No recovered files would open. I looked at Stellar's paid options, and the high-end version included auto-repair tools for images and other document types. It wasn't cheap at around £100 though, and I was sceptical, so I Googled around the issue. Read the comments to this article by Stellar Data Recovery. Essentially, hundreds of people had the same issue: all the files recovered just would not open. Stellar's response to this was that they were clearly corrupt before you even used data recovery software, a notion that enraged many people in the comments and had many more pointing out what a load of bollocks that was after having paid £100 for software that essentially showed them their old data but wouldn't give it back to them. Needless to say, I decided against joining that pool of people who spent their money to gain nothing back, and called it a lost cause.
Success - miniTools!
I had one more piece of software that I found called miniTools. It had good reviews online also, so before finally accepting that everything was lost and I'd just have to get used to it, I installed this and gave it a whirl. Like Stellar, it could show you what it was recovering as it found them. As soon as it started, it began finding thousands and thousands of files. As it did so, it keeps them in a folder called 'RAW' data. Within that folder are a bunch more folders, each one titled with a file format such as ,jpg, .tif, .png, and so on. I headed into the JPEG folder to find thousands being listed, and each one could be previewed! I could see my photos, my screenshots, everything! The final test was to export a bunch of the recovered files and try to open them. Minitools lets you recover files while it is still scanning, which is cool. All photos opened just fine! For the first time in 2-3 days of testing, I could actually see fully restored files coming up! I was so happy!
The catch? Minitools lets you restore up to 1GB of data for free, then tells you to pay for the software to get more (£80 or so) The difference here is that you can restore files on the fly for free, and they actually worked. This is where the others fell down for me, so I really highly recommend this software! Of course £80 isn't exactly cheap either, but it proved that it would work beforehand, and knew it had me by the balls if I really did want back what it had just found.
The Process of Recovering
There's a few things to note about this process that I've learned along the way. Once miniTools had finished scanning my drive for recoverable data, it found around 5TB worth on a 3TB disk that was never even full... go figure? What happened becomes more apparent as you go on restoring data. There are essentially 2 sets of your data. One set looks just like your data did. It's all in the folder structures correctly, has all the correct metadata present, and so on. Granted, bits of this data were still missing after all this (installing Windows would have definitely overwritten some data for sure). However, if you restore this data, you'll quickly run into that good old issue of nothing opens. Not a single file. I'm not sure exactly how this is, but it makes a bit of sense. This data is all the metadata and heading data of everything on the disk, but none of it is functional. What you need is the RAW data.
In miniTools, after the scan is complete it tells you how many partitions of data it found. For me, it was about 12. I'm not sure what they all are, but most had random crap in them that I didn't recognise as mine at all. The first few had files and folder structures I recognised, but they didn't open. The very last partition is called RAW Files. This is what you need.
Selecting the file formats you care about, you can tell them to export to a selected drive. Note that if you haven't paid for miniTools yet, you can do so now without having to wait hours for it to rescan the drive again. If the file format you were looking for isn't there, you can change which file formats miniTools should try to find in its options. For example, .txt files are off by default. Turning this on however found over million .txt files I wasn't aware existed!
It should be noted that some file formats are not available for recovery. I work as a 3D artist, so I can only cast light on graphic formats that it couldn't find really. For the most part it was very good! It can discover Maya files, Max files, Photoshop files, and Illustrator files to say the least. But it couldn't discover .indd files, InDesign files. I found this a little odd seeing as they are part of the same family as Photoshop and Illustrator, but I assume there must be something more to them that makes them difficult to read in some way?
Another note that might be very helpful for general computer users alike, is that miniTools differentiates between jpeg files, and jpegs files taken specifically from a camera. This made finding holiday photos and such far more easier! It does this by reading files that have metadata attached to them; something that every camera will automatically do to photos you take with it.
Recovered_jpg_file_68752.jpg
Get used to seeing the above. Every file recovered will be named in a similar way. Every file will say it was made today. Every file will have no context of where it was or what it was used for. The hard part begins now, but hey, you got your data back at least!
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