Marty
Also, if you attempt to use this or any other program to recover the jpgs, etc. you should do that before you use the undelete function. If you undelete them to the original media - which I did because I was experimenting and already had a good copy - you will no be able to recover the jpgs after the undelete.

Susie
It is in the read me file which you can see in the folder created after unzipping the download.

marty

As stated, I do not / did not see a read me file, as I have with every other GOTD I have downloaded and installed!

Now the installayion time has expired. This software is something I really needed, I am disappointed it didn't work for me!

Susan
Hello Susan, sorry for any inconvenience. It was a mistake. We've contacted GOTD to update the original price on this page. We've always been honest and tried to provide our best for you. Thanks.

jamies
Where did you get that this offering is 1GB limited?

After registering, it shows it is the "personal license" edition, and not the free trail (which is limited).

jamies
Once registered it becomes a Personal Licence which is unlimited according to their comparison page:-
http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/power-data-recovery-compare-license-type.html

jamies
"A 1GB limit is what I would expect from a free trial download -
So this GOTD is in actuality not a free giveaway, but a crippled version of the product."

Sorry, but I didn't/don't see any limits like that, except on the vendor's site where they offer the free trial.

As for using MiniTool Power Data Recovery, don't see why you should expect problems there, or at least any more problems that you might have recovering files with most such tools. They can be handy when/if something's accidentally deleted, & **maybe** in some cases when a drive is starting to have problems, and in either case what you're after isn't on a backup.

"get a set of USB sticks and do backups of your data to them"

That could work if you're talking about stuff like emails & docs & a few pictures, but USB sticks are Very often slow to write to, Very often unreliable, somewhat difficult to label [to keep them straight] & so on. Better IMHO to use the cloud, perhaps with automatic syncing, or another hard drive, internal or external -- odds are against 2 drives failing at the exact same time, or in the case of accidentally deleting a file or files, odds are against you making the same mistake twice. SD [& mini/micro SD] cards can be another option -- since the USB electronics are in the reader, I think their failure rate is Much less than what you see with USB sticks. And they're easier to store, label etc.

"That's considering the most likely time for trouble is while doing a backup - when the failure can kill the OS drive and your backup."

I've never seen this over a decade+ of doing disk/partition image backups on several PCs/laptops.

"Also - no mention of how it would recover files 'deleted' from a SSD that does 'memory management'!"

Mechanical drives & SSDs both store data the same way when it comes to clusters & file tables & such. Recovery apps work by finding pieces of files that are not listed in the file tables, & then try to put those pieces together. One way that SSDs are different is that while it takes a mechanical drive the same amount of time to write data as it does to overwrite data, with a SSD an overwrite may take longer. Because of that a SSD might clear storage that's no longer in use, making anything stored there irrecoverable, but that sort of thing varies somewhat with the SSD make & model.

jamies
No free alternative? No previous GAOTD that has all those features? Then just don't install it. Why write a diatribe against it.

God forbid this company actually makes any money by coding. That would be evil, right? And we all know capitalism must be stomped out. Do you feel the Bern? All programs should be free and we should tax the coders. Yeah, that's the ticket.

jamies
OK Hammer. Yes, egg on face.

The 1GB was from the response from Casper re the installed status and the stand-alone version.
Now noted that registering activates the 'Personal' level.

Marty -
I've been caught by other Recovery facilities that took hours to show a limited set (by space) of recoverable files.
And I accept that creators are due payment (I am one).
It was the mistaken impression of the limitation in presentation as a GOTD that caused me to post. If I find something good I advise others of the good products.

Regardless of that - most users will only have 1 machine, with 1 (user) partition so if that drive or partition becomes unusable - such that they cannot get the system to run then a previously installed version on that will also be unusable.

Add to that the supply of many systems nowadays that have SSD's - with the recovery problems introduced by the 'storage management' built into the drive's controller and the need for proper backup becomes more evident.

jamies
Good idea backing-up using multiple USB drives - I made the mistake of using a single one which became corrupted after repeated use.
Always format USB drives periodically as you would the (now) obsolete floppy disks.

mike
Firstly - re usability to recover the OS partition - see the Marty /Painter, and others conversation.

Secondly - please read my response to the reply by Hammer - you will find it in the appropriate time/thread placement below.

Thirdly - Windows assumes the data is static on the drive - accessible via LBA - which is recorded in the FAT, or NTFS space management and file attribute recording and indexing systems. A quality SSD - or memory stick - SD type device will have a further layer of 'structure' allocating, and switching the actual storage cells to LBA references as the drive is used.
I'm not sure if you have, or have not quite got the difference between rotational disk storage and SSD storage.
I'd advise those with SSD, or considering getting one to read about SSD memory management/ wear evening. The better write-ups detail the reasons for problems recovering data from them - as in the parts of a deleted file will frequently (if not usually) have been assigned different LBA addresses when the file was overwritten, or even the entry in the MFT detailing it was changed.

Finally - I have personally experienced 1 case of motherboard failure taking all attached storage devices while doing backup, and another 2 cases with those I support.
Yes - use cloud - providing you have appropriately fast and reliable links. There are lots of cheap bulk opportunities and several small volume free ones.
Even better - there are some that record incremental updates and can let you re-acquire' any of the versions that you got saved.
Also - mini- SD cards - Yes especially if your PC/tablet whatever has a slot that offers protection from physical damage by taking the card inside of it's casing - again use a set in a cycle - the most frequent need for recovering a file is the user saving over the original after deleting important content.

However - please remember - optical media (not using packet mode) tends to keep data from files as consecutive blocks on the surface - so, if the actual recording media (dye) has not degraded - time, light, damp, mould physical damage etc. then the likelihood of recovery of files without needing the file allocation table is good. Also storage volume is usually quite small compared to modern hard drives.
Electronic media - 1 miswrite to the 'control tables or indexing/allocation' parts of the storage and goodbye to the details of which bit of file is where. so how will a recovery program locate, and join part two and part 3 of a file to part 1 - when the data is spread over, maybe a 3TB area? ( and at USB-3 5Gb/sec interface speed, but - 200MB/sec actual surface reading speed - that's 15000 seconds just to read the data from the drive.)

So - multiple backups of what you typed in - and the rest - (apart from GOTD type stuff) you can just re-acquire it onto your new PC - well the old one failed - so you'll need a new one! - warrantee and faster and cheaper considering labour costs than trying to resurrect a failing system.

Painter
You appear to have solved the main problem I see with the software. No way to fix the drive it is on.

Does what you have done put everything on the external drive and execute from there? No dependence on anything on the boot drive?

alternety
There is a reference on the boot drive, but you can execute from the external drive. To be sure, you can always make a boot disk to boot directly into the external drive, and run the execute file from there. Hope that helps.

Painter
Dear Painter,
Would you kindly explain how to create a boot disk that boots directly into an external drive?
Thanks in advance for your helpful tip.

Regards,
consuella

Painter
So you are saying that the executable is on the external drive. But are you saying this is a standalone program that does not need the Windows OS to execute?? I would think that whatever machine you are using it on would have to be the one it was installed on.

In other words, just what steps did you take to "install it to an external drive"? I just copied it to a stick and can't run it from there on another PC with or without the DLLs.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Another method to use it would be to install it on two machines and take the HD out of the sick machine, hook it to the healthy machine and scan for errors or lost files from the healthy OS.

Marty
I just attempted to run this as an executable from a USB stick. It will not work without the DLLS. It did work with them but it asked for the registration code on each new machine on which I tried it. Once entered on a given machine the executable ran without asking for the code again (on that machine). I will try to run it from Windows PE and post my results here.

Marty
I did use this from a USB but only on a working

Marty
I did use this on a USB but only on a booted healthy working windows OS.

I booted a version of Windows PE from CD on two machines and recovery would not work because the PE is 32 bit and the recovery program on the USB is 64 bit. At least that is what the error message led me to believe.

I also used Lazesoft Recovery (which is 64 bit) and when I clicked on the recovery program in the two explorers provided, nothing happened.

If anyone gets this to boot from a PE Windows personal environment, please post for those of us who can't figure it out.

Casper There IS a free bootable version which can recover up to 1GB data. If you need more than that you can always purchase the program. After all the vendor deserves a fair wage for their work.