Best Recovery Software HELP!!

[Eighth Avenue]

Hi all,

My dearest mother took her computer into a computer shop with a wifi problem, they misunderstood the problem and reformatted the computer and put it back to factory settings. As a result my mother has lost a lot of work and some valuable photos of people that are no longer with us. The shop has recovered a lot of the files but they now don't have metadata so she has to look through 1000+ documents to see what they are and resave them.

I can find recovery software on Google but has anyone actually used any that they could reccomend?

Thanks,

Iain

 

[Mikesphotaes]

Recuva has been good for me..........

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[sbowler579]

Recuva has been good for me..........

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[stryvya]

+1

 

[kendo1]

Avira Unerase is one I've used before. Free.
I download from Majorgeeks.

 

[Eighth Avenue]

Thanks guys

 

[boolean]

If there is no metadata then it sounds like they used diskdigger - not too expensive and very good for recovery from a reinstall from a system image that has formatted the disk. You might want to try a trial of get back data for ntfs from runtime software - http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm it's a bit more pricey but will show you what your chances of recovery are. Recuva isn't really capable of recovery from formatted disks.

 

[boolean]

Oh and don't use the PC in question, take the disk out and connect it to another via a usb caddy, all the time it's used the less chance you have of recovery.

 

[JustJoe]

Oh and don't use the PC in question, take the disk out and connect it to another via a usb caddy, all the time it's used the less chance you have of recovery.

Yep and don't write anything new to the drive. Nothing is really deleted until its written over.

 

[Steep]

I've used Zero Assumption Recovery with some success when recovering a hard drive. Most files are recovered fine but there are some files that are recovered as simply numbers so you have to check each of them individually.

 

[Neilc28]

I've used Zero Assumption Recovery with some success when recovering a hard drive. Most files are recovered fine but there are some files that are recovered as simply numbers so you have to check each of them individually.

ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) as Steep said is VERY good, have had to use it before on too many machines! But from the sounds of it that is not the software you need as you already have the files, it's more that the files are mixed from what I read in your initial post?