Today's GOTD offer is "iCare Format Recovery". There is very useful investigatory method that no one mentioned on the "download / comment page" involving the recovery of lost files. I tried to post a comment regarding the use of disk imaging in file recovery on the page but I fear I was too late and that my post was mangled so horribly that no one could make any sense out of what I had written. I am posting the information here with hopes that it may help someone not familiar with the method of recovering files from an image of the partition originally holding the lost files.
I hope that my post is helpful and that it is translated a little bit better here than it was on the comment page.
I cannot say that this is the best way, so I will say that this is the safest way that I know of to go about recovering files. The first step is to make an image of the partition that held the lost files. The image that you make is exactly the same as the partition that it is made from. From here on you do all your investigations on the imaged copy leaving the original untouched. Your chance of recovering the file from the image is exactly the same as it would be if you are working with the damaged partition itself.
An advantage of using the image rather than the original drive for testing is that you can test the image in many different ways without worrying that you might be damaging the original partition. Different ways could include hardware investigations as well as software recovery methods.