Post-Mortem

@27:
Right. I made Munsoft (Russia) the provider while in fact it is Digital River GmbH (Germany).

This does not change anything else in my comment, because buyers will do business with a German company.

How about a program that will recover really old .ARC files?

Any ideas?

@John. When I was in my film class I used to create 3D graphics with Cinema 4D. This one time I had this 7 second clip that when rendered out as an avi file would total up to over 4gb = over 4000mb. I used winrar to compress it using the "best" method and it comprssed my file to 60 mb. Considering I didn't have a 4gb flashdrive at the time to take that file home and add more effects to it then bring it back, it helped me a ton to archive it.

Someone said this program shows what's in the archives, can I actually just recover a file from a lost archive or is it gone if the whole archive is gone >

@13 papin

MunSoft isn't a german company and never was, it's a russian company with headquarter in Smolensk. Since Russia isn't EU anymore, you will have different VAT normally, which is 18% in Russia.

The payment will be done from a Digital River headquarter in Germany, Digital River of course also has a headquarter in Russia.

Share-it - Digital River GmbH
Vogelsanger Str. 78
50823 Cologne
Germany

VAT in Germany
http://www.nrwinvest.com/Business_Guide_englisch/The_tax_system/Value_Added_Tax/index.php

Here is the passage of the Terms of Service from their Online Data Recovery, as said, it isn't a german company because their ToS are under Russian Law, just the payment will be processed from the german Digital River headquarter, whoever knows why.

Any dispute, controversy or claim which may arise out of or in connection with the present ToS, or the execution, breach, termination or invalidity thereof, shall be settled by the International Commercial Arbitration Court at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation in accordance with its Rules.

http://onlinerecovery.munsoft.com/terms_of_service.php

Thanks GOTD Team
I see you added " (including support and updates)" to the message. Much clearer that way.

Cheers

To #19, See: http://www.passwordunlocker.com/rar-password-recovery.html
Good luck

It is worth having several different recovery programs, although if they are not free you probably don't want to pay for them in advance.

I had to recover some pictures for a friend from a flash drive that according to windows had nothing on it. I tried 3 different freeware programs. One completely failed to recover anything. Another recovered a good number of pictures and the third also recovered a good number of pictures, but not all the same ones.

Between the 2 good programs (one was Recuva) I got back as much as I had hoped for and all the pictures recovered bar one were perfect. These weren't in zip files and I can see the use of a specific program to retrieve files from compressed archives.

Any program like this might be just the one you need in a crisis.

I am fairly not only a faithful GOTD fellow but also a software hobbyist who loves to share my acknowledges about computer files processing methods with GOTD visitors. Today's GOTD procedure without doubt maybe be called a compression files recovery tool . But disable to be called a data recovery program cause of it is not only useless to recover our Media files, contacts, messages, office documentaries and so on but also cannot transfer our files to other devices or OS platform. I can give you some advice about it, please reference !

Pros :

1. Compression files' recovery functions.
2. Simple operation interface for computer newbies.

Cons :
1. Deficient of other most mainstream formats' files recovery abilities like media, documentary.
2. No online support.
3. Cost so much.

A CNET file transfer tool for us, which was located here : http://download.cnet.com/ImElfin-iTransfer-for-Win/3000-18553_4-75941441.html. I trialed it for several times, really works well.

please does anyone know where to get a rar password unlocker? i have tried the so called application and its taking almost eternity to calculate the password. pls help. thanks.

#4 is incorrect that there is no need for a specialized recovery program for a specific file type. Many file types have an internal structure that can help recover a deleted file, or at least partly repair a file with gaps or corruption. That includes all types of compressed archive files. However there is never any guarantee that a file can be made functional again after arbitrary damage. It all depends on where the damage is in the file's internal structure. It's like somebody removed part of your car - if it's the trunk lid, the car will still work, if it's the crankshaft, it won't.

Am I missing something?
Why is there a big bold message offering a 70% discount on a personal license for Easy Archive Recovery 2.0... when it's a GAOTD?

Company or developer should respond to comment #4 who said it was actually tested and failed. I do not have time to test it right now but that is enough for me to not try it.

This one is the only one that has worked for me.

Great tool ant it is free for today. Don't think in the bucks for today it is 0 bucks. Don't miss it.

#7 ALF
Point taken, but many general recovery programs do sort out into file types so they can be filtered.
More than anything I want newer computer users to understand how files are written by the system and that type does not influence this fact.
When you do a recovery and you look at the file headers it is obvious they are not the type of file the recovery system believes they, I have tested this on a number of recovery programs.
One other point, if you buy a recovery program just for specific files it can become very expensive as they do not tend to be cheap programs.

View this as an exercise to help practice your buying skills.

Say, you like this GOTD. You're willing to pay. Remember, Munsoft is a company based in Germany, thus within the EU (European Union).

Regarding cases #1, #2 and #3, values come from Munsoft's price list.

Case #1:
You live within the EU, but not in Germany. They charge you 19% VAT, which is wrong. So, instead of paying EUR 49.95 ($67.61) before VAT ($12.84), you'll pay EUR 59.44 ($80.45), VAT included.

Case #2:
You live in Germany. You rightly pay EUR 59.44 ($80.45), VAT included.

Case #3:
You don't live within the EU. (Can't supply data, see hint below.)

Case #4:
You buy the GOTD. The price tag is $59.95 (EUR 44.30).

Questions:
a) Should you buy anything, do the prices given in the price list represent what you will really pay?
b) Depending on the country you live in, how difficult (or easy) is it to get the VAT refunded (or to not pay it out)?
c) What is the real price of this software (case #4)?

Hint. You must try to buy on the Munsoft web site to get some answers. Munsoft's web site has a script (must activate javascript anyway) which determines where you are, and provides an automatic (?) yet amusing translation.

60 $ to recover or fix damaged ZIP and RAR archives??

Come on...you must be joking dude!!

To recover for free ANY kind of files even from RAW drives:

http://www.puransoftware.com/File-Recovery.html

To repair for free almost ANY kind of files (so not just RAR and ZIP files...LOL!!)damaged by virus, application failures, system crashes, network errors etc....

http://www.filerepair1.com

To extract broken ZIP files only:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ziprecoveryjava

And by the way...why use RAR (and pay $$$$$ for that)??

Be clever...

http://www.hamstersoft.com/free-zip-archiver (==> My Personal First choice for its amazing processing SPEED)
http://www.bandicam.com/bandizip
http://www.zipgenius.com

Enjoy!!

My 2 cents for today's giveaway!!

Whether a zip file can be recovered or not, depends both on how bad the corruption is and where it has occurred in the file. A single corrupted bit in a vital place can render the zip unrecoverable, but if you are lucky then you can have a series of corrupted bits and it still be recoverable - It's just luck on where the errors have occurred.

There is a good freeware zip recovery program, at least it is as good as anything else I tried a couple of years ago and I had a corrupted zip I needed to get as many files as possible out of it.

http://download.cnet.com/DiskInternals-ZIP-Repair/3000-2250_4-146638.html

@John, #4: "why does anyone need to compress anything?"
Compressing files has not as only use small storage-size.
One might want to bundle files in one archive.
One might compress files to send them over the internet.
All very usefull.

@ XP-Man, #3:
I do agree that files are just files and recovering files doesn't urge one to discriminate between filetypes.

Indeed this is done sometimes to shred functionallity into usefull pieces in a way that buying all the pieces together would be more profitable for the seller then selling one solid functional program. Again I agree that this is only good for the seller and not for the user.

BUT:
There is something else that should be considered.

While recovering you realy want to be able to decide what is to be definitely recovered from the resultlist and what not. Viewer-functionallity is a very efficient means to make your decision more easy.
There are so many filetypes that it would be impossible to accomodate viewers for all of them onboard.
But there are some filetype categories that are being used very frequently and commonly.
This could mean you want to recover pictures, documents or archives like todays giveaway.

By confining functionallity to one of those categories would make it possible to supply the appropriate viewers.

One might argue, why not throw in all the available viewers. Well you can choose for such by buying the complete Munsoft Suite. Of course all this extra coding will cost you. In case you only want to recover just one specific categorie you can have yourself a cheaper deal by not buying the suite but only buy the package with the viewers of your choice.

In all the cases where viewers are not included, there is no need to shred functionallity indeed.

#4 John
If you're storing information on your own CD the rar file does have some advantages as you can tell it to write recovery information within the file just in case the file becomes corrupted. This increases the file size by between 3% and 10% a value you control.

The file system knows nothing about file type when it stores files; best simply described as a header describing information about the file and then the position the remainder of the file on the drive if it's fragmented, which it is more often than not is particularly in NT systems.
This means has a lot of snake oil in the file recovery business where companies claim to just recover certain file types and so can charge for many programs instead of just one that is necessary.
So I didn't want to condemn this program offhand, I thought possibly it could recover the data from a slightly corrupted archive file.
With this in mind I compressed 15 image files and then using a hex editor I lightly corrupted the zip file.
Then I requested this program to recover the file, it claimed it had done so, but in fact all it had done to create an empty folder with absolutely no recovered files in it.

I'll leave you to decide whether it snake oil or not, but I'm uninstalling it pronto!

Reference to the free and useful data recovery instruction pages, give you an example to make a better choice.

Lifehacker : http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best-free-data-recovery-tools

CNET : http://download.cnet.com/Data-Recovery/3000-2094_4-10664893.html
http://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Data-Recovery-Wizard-Free-Edition/3000-2248_4-75184619.html
http://www.cnet.com/topic-software/data-recovery.html

looks great by seeing description.till i dont download and use it,cant say anything.

Installed on Win 7 64bit no probs registration went without a hitch.

I had a thumb drive that has some damaged rar files on it and was able to recover 4 out of the 7 damaged rars. I like the fact you can see what the rars has in it and the fact it says that it cant or can recover the files. Thanks GOTD for this its a keeper. But I would not pay $60 bucks for it.

Looks like a useful piece of software, but why is its web page only available in russian? On the site the personal license price is 595 rubles ($18), the business license is 995 rubles ($31), and the "service" license is 3495 rubles ($109). And here we see $59.95 (?!?)