Over 10 TB and 600,000 files recovered

The Great Disk Recovery of ’15 is almost complete and so far I have recovered over 10TB worth of data which accounts for over 600,000 files. It’s taken days and a couple of new drives added to the scheme, but ALL the data has been salvaged. All the movies, music, documents and pictures have been recovered and are all viewable once more.

Whether or not this was a system glitch or some user error on my part, the fact remains 5 drives had damaged partitions and weren’t recognized as readable by Windows. A simple "undelete" wasn’t possible so it was a pretty serious SNAFU.

But GetData Recover My Files has done a perfect job of getting those files back. I even saw files I deleted 6 months ago that could still be recovered. In fact, some of them were because it was easier to select the entire volumes rather than hunt and peck over a couple of folders. Good heavens this is some strong software.

I’ve learned my lesson though. I bought more drives so I have a copy of an entire drive and I’ve already backed up other items to Blu-Ray discs. Backing up the system isn’t a problem, that was taken care of months ago with O&O DiskImage. The data drives were the problem since I wasn’t making copies. That has since been corrected.

Another lesson learned is to have a large, spare hard drive sitting around. Since I was recovering 5TB of data, I needed another drive of equal size which I happened to have. When doing a partition recovery like this you can pick and choose items so it’s possible to do in stages, but it’s so much easier and more reliable to do it all at once to a sufficiently sized hard drive.

For those that want to know here’s what I have in place now.

O&O DiskImage – Clones the System drive and copies the image to D:\ for archiving. The system drive is a 3TB internal and the archive is also a 3TB internal. Backup size is less than 100GB.

Recuva – Great for recovering accidentally deleted files. Used it before with great success. Purchased as part of the CCleaner Professional Plus Suite. Very quick and efficient.

GetData Recover My Files 5.x – Much deeper level of file retrieval. Used for corrupted partitions, recover files from formatted disk, RAW disk recovering and disk cloning. Can be used when the disk is listed as "unreadable" by Windows. Does not "undelete" or "unformat" to the same volume. Files need to be copied to another volume.

SyncBackSE – Used to sync files between drives. This is an older copy but it still works. I might upgrade to the latest version at some point or I might go with O&O AutoBackup.

Ashampoo Burning Studio – I’ve had a lot of luck with this app. Easy to use and reliable. Burns files to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray without issue. You can also get it very cheaply. This is what I use to backup files to physical media and has been working pretty hard since this fiasco.

This space for rent.

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