Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   If you grabbed Do Your Data Recovery Pro today [Sunday's GOTD], it seems that it's portable, that you can copy the program's folder wherever to additional PCs &/or copies of Windows, as long as you activated it before the offer expired. It doesn't add any files/folders outside of desktop & Start Menu shortcuts, and while it adds a registry key under HKLM\Software when installed, that does not change with activation, and is not created when you run a copy of the activated Do Your Data Recovery Pro in another copy of Windows.

   ---

   From the comments on the download page, in case it's useful...

   You might think of a hard drive, or whatever storage device, as a digital book. When you've got lost files you want to recover, think of that book as 1) missing the table of contents & index, and 2) the words are jumbled around in no particular order. The data making up your files is still [hopefully] there, but you have no way of making sense of it. Do Your Data Recovery Pro & similar scan the storage device for any & all data, then try to piece the fragments into files, kind of like taking the jumbled words in my make believe book and trying to put them back in sentences that make sense.

   In order for Do Your Data Recovery Pro to do its job of course the data you're after has to be there. If the files went missing because they were accidentally deleted, that data's most likely there immediately after it was deleted, but if the files went missing because of some other sort of problem or glitch, there's a good chance that some of that data's missing. If those files were stored on a SSD, time is important, since a SSD will often clear deleted data the same way as Windows when it runs the Trim process on that SSD -- unlike a conventional hard drive, the old data has to be cleared before new data can be stored in its place, so with SSDs deleted data's cleared proactively, so you don't have to wait for data to be cleared when you write to that SSD.

   With a conventional hard drive, the OS [e.g. Windows] assumes that data was deleted intentionally, and that it can write new data in its place -- writing new data over part or all of a missing file means it's gone forever -- so you want to stop writing to the drive partition where your missing files are ASAP... If your missing data is on a separate partition from the OS [Windows] that's not usually a big problem -- don't open or save any work to that partition. But if the missing data is on the system partition where the OS lives, it's not a terrible idea to pull the plug immediately, because as long as Windows is running, even if just long enough to shut down, it's writing to that drive. Note that when you get a message during installation to not install recovery software on the drive partition where you need to recover files, it's because in writing the app's files to the drive, any missing files may be overwritten.

   It's a great practice Not to save any files or work to the system partition in the 1st place -- store that stuff on another partition &/or in the cloud -- but if you're caught with missing files on the system partition, and you've shut Windows down [pulled the plug], you'll need to access that drive some other way to get your files back. You can physically attach that drive to another PC or laptop; if you've got more than one OS installed, you can run another OS; you can use a bootable USB stick or drive with another OS installed -- some recovery software includes this option, or you can use something like a Windows 2 Go drive; using the bootable USB stick from a disk/partition image backup app, you can backup the complete partition -- all sectors so it includes free space -- and then back running Windows normally you can restore that backup to another drive or partition, & run the file recovery there. [FWIW, on our PCs I have a 2nd, base copy of Windows 10 installed just for stuff like creating/restoring backups, or when there's a problem with the primary copy of Windows.]

   Do bear in mind that you might have better luck with one recovery app than another, so it doesn't hurt to collect giveaways like Do Your Data Recovery Pro, and try them all if or as needed -- if you lose files for some other reason than you simply deleted them, in my experience I don't believe there's any way to predict which recovery app will work best for you. Earlier this year I lost all the data on a drive used purely for data storage because of an odd ball Windows glitch... I got most of it back, but I used several apps, results varied quite a bit, and the often recommended Recuva was the 2nd worst of the bunch [EaseUS actually turned out best in this case].

   Posted 5 years ago #
2. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   Your favorite backup utility might include a feature to mount the image as a drive, meaning that you won't need to restore the backup before running various recovery software. That will save you time and disk space. The versions of Macrium Reflect and Aomei Backupper that I use include such a feature (it's also handy if you just want to extract a single file from a backup). If your backup utility doesn't allow mounting the image then OFSMount might work but you might need to save the image in a non-proprietary format.

   Mikiem mentioned capturing "all sectors" which you generally don't do. Normally, you'll make an "intelligent sector copy" which means only those sectors flagged by the file system as "in use" will be copied. You'll need to find the option to make an "exact copy" and you'll need enough space for the entire partition. If you didn't previously partition your new 4 TB drive into multiple partitions then you might be in trouble.

   You might also want to take a gander at AOMEI PE Builder ( a new version came out last fall) for creating bootable media. It should boot much faster than a "Windows To Go" drive and it already includes Aomei Backupper so you won't need to install a backup utility. The downside is that it's a PE so you might need to find alternatives to the utilities that you could use with a "Window To Go" drive.

   Finally, never run data recovery software on a failing drive because you'll probably just finish killing it. Image the drive and run your recovery software on the image.

   Posted 5 years ago #
3. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   VERY good point on making an image of a failing drive rather than trying to recover files from it.

   I find the Windows To Go drives interesting... They're a regular copy of Windows 10, installed to a MBR formatted drive, with only one added FAT32 boot partition -- no Microsoft hidden or Recovery partitions. Windows 10 will only create one using the .wim for the Enterprise version of 10. I like that part, using the Enterprise version, because it will never activate in personal use. An activated copy of win10, depending on the license version, will allow a Very Much Unspecified, limited number of hardware changes. What I'm afraid of is that each time you run a non-Enterprise version of win10 from a USB drive, it will try to activate automatically, and count against however many hardware changes you're allowed. Microsoft is pretty sneaky about how it IDs hardware devices, and I'm almost positive that it can tell every registered copy of 10 that's been on that device, as well as access the registration data that was provided, has been added to that account etc., when win10 phones home.

   An interesting side effect, it seems that you can add additional copies of win10 to a device, and as long as one copy of win10 is activated, the added copies will auto-activate as well. When I upgraded the motherboard/CPU on this rig, it would have been more hassle than I was willing to undertake to keep my copy of win7 alive. So I installed a fresh copy of win10 Pro to that SSD instead, and it activated automatically. [Besides, I wanted to see if there was any effect from using only AMD drivers, rather than having Intel drivers plus the new AMD ones, and being too lazy to reinstall all my software at one go, wanted to keep the existing copy of 10 with that software.]

   While I've never tried using it for that, Rufus is supposed to create Windows To Go drives as well. It's a neat app if you've never looked at it... It's very small, mainly intended to create bootable USB sticks using whatever ISO, and has better boot options that anything else I've tried, including Microsoft's stuff. That Might also make things easier if you get into some of the stuff at reboot[.]pro . Still love the idea of a copy of XP at < 1GB, and win7 not too much bigger. More recently I used MistyPE [ mistyprojects[.]co[.]uk/documents/MistyPE/index.html ] to create a working ISO that's 1.36GB. Boot to one of those mini-OSes, run the Portable VirtualBox launcher [ vbox[.]me/ ], then fire up a VM with a full Windows OS with all your installed software. That's the lowest overhead I could figure out to run VBox anyway, and on most hardware portably.

   The weakness of Windows To Go drives in my experience is that while win10 is Much better than earlier versions about adapting to new, different hardware, it hangs on to all the previously installed drivers, and whatever files installing those drivers adds. My old Asus motherboard added a file to the Windows\SysWOW64\ folder, and that prevented win10 from starting on some hardware [including the new motherboard I'm using now :( ]. That's where stuff like the AOMEI PE Builder comes in. AFAIK WinPE can't have that problem. One thing about AOMEI's software I found interesting is that you used to be able to run the copy of the app in the app's X64 folder as a portable version of the app. Now if you try to run it, it says WinPE only. It does include an install.bat file -- looks like you might be able to add it to an existing WinPE USB stick or drive.

   That's the option I'll check out when I get the new win10 1809 PE up & running [assuming they ever release 1809]. I've had problems getting AOMEI's WinPE to boot on everything -- I've had problems with most everything else too, with the notable exception of Macrium & pure-bred WinPE. Booting to USB can be such a hassle Nowadays! Everyone's got different combos of UEFI & Legacy modes, plus win10 jumps into the bios settings to replace the list of devices you can choose to boot from. And then there's Secure Boot muddying the waters. And with current devices over the past few years, it can be a big deal just getting to the bios settings -- it can be easier to use EasyBCD to add a fake OS to the boot menu, just so you see the boot menu, and then can easily access the bios, Safe Mode, whatever.

   If you didn't previously partition your new 4 TB drive into multiple partitions then you might be in trouble.

   Yeah... The storage drive I mentioned that Windows blanked out for me was used strictly for large files, like local copies of my VMs, and so wasn't partitioned. I had backups of those on the NAS, but I also had some image files [300-500MB each .PSD files] that I hadn't copied anywhere yet. If it was a more normal accidental deletion it wouldn't have been too bad, but whatever happened some portions were gone forever, old partition data was gone from the partition tables etc., so I had to run full, in-depth scans. Fortunately being a pure storage drive I could run scans continuously, and aside from Recuva, which didn't play nice multitasking, generally get on with whatever I was doing in the meantime. But to your point about large partitions... that scanning took Days.

   Posted 5 years ago #

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