I have tons of hard drives. Right now, on my desk I have (2) 250GB Drives (1) 500GB Drive and a 160GB Drive. Roughly two months ago I plugged in my hard drive. Probably my most important hard drive because this was the hard drive that I backed up and relocated all my master photos too. I had wedding photos, birthdays, photos I cherished and loved. When I plugged in this hard drive I was shocked to find that all the data had vanished! It was all gone except for some abstract file. I thought the external Hard Drive enclosure had failed. (BTW NEVER! Buy Compusa’s homebrand External Hard Drive enclosures, I’ve gone through about 3 in a year and keep getting them replaced via warranty)

I realized that the hard drive was spinning up, it showed that the entire hard drive had free space. So it wasn’t broken, just that ALL my files had mysteriously deleted themselves.

I now have been trying to 2 months to recover the data off this hard drive. I’ve tried several programs both for mac and PC. The hard drive wasn’t broken the files were just gone. I original had the hard drive formatted FAT32 so it could work on both mac and pc which I didn’t realize until later that made the hard drive incredibly unstable.

Here are some programs that I tried:

Disk Warrior (Mac) - Probably a great program but will not help you recover deleted files

PC Inspector File Recovery (PC) - This free application probably works well with small hard drives or flash drives but was frustrating to work with with my hard drive. After leaving the program on for a week straight I only got to 32% recovery before it would crash. I tried several times but it kept crashing.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery (PC) - Same issues as above. Very unstable took what seemed an eternity.

Free Undelete (PC) -  Probably works well with small devices but couldn’t handle major tasks.

Data Rescue II (Mac) - I am so happy with this program that I’m writing this blog article so you can understand my frustration and relief. This program is amazingly fast compared to the ones listed above and totally reliable! My problem with the software above is that when my hard drive would stop responding, which I have yet to figure out, the program would crash. However, with Data Rescue II I can save where I left off, reboot the hard drive and resume from where I left off…

As of this moment I have retrieved 45/250GB but am doing it so much faster that I have no worries