Hello,
please note that registration information and process is always described in the readme file.

We kindly advice to start any GOTD installation with reading this file first!

GOTD team

Daniel, is your program registered ?....found and restored over a 1,000 photos of mine

walt, Yep. Downloaded and successfully registered. It found a whole bunch of deleted images but recovered none of them successfully.

Daniel, ...wow that is strange...i noticed the program doesn't actually show a registration it just removes
the 'unregistered' icon at the top of the program at least in my case??????

don't know how i was able to get it to register but must have (after several tries) as i recovered over a 1,000 photos

walt, you should right click the file and then use the "Open as Administrator" option.

Grump Pah, unfortunately it won't be able to help. But if you have a corrupted hard drive which you can't access the files on, but Windows does recognise that the drive is there, there is a reasonable chance you will be able to recover files with this.

If Windows can't see the drive, then sending the drive to a professional data recovery company is the only option to recover data.

Roger, that's what I thought. Thanks for your honest answer, but you might want to rephrase the claim that it recovers data from "inaccessible drives".

Julie, That's all very well, but when "someone" sabotages not one but THREE of your hard disks -- by over-writing them(!) -- as "someone" did to me, and when each was possibly backed up to each other -- you have got to TRY anything that MIGHT work....

I don't have a lot of hope, frankly, but after making images of all three, I am determined to see if I can get ANY parts of the files back. Because some of them were a large part of a book I was writing...

In fact, seeing the words, "Magical Partition Recovery" in their ad above has just reminded me that I learned somewhere that MAYBE all that really happened was the "partition information" was removed!

I don't know how true this may be, but as I will be working on IMAGES, I think it worth a try -- to "reconstitute" the partitions.

Has anyone ever had any experience of trying this -- and got SOMETHING /ANYTHING back??

I would like to be encouraged.... Thanks!

Tranmontane, Depending on how important/crucial you want to label your files/pictures, you may want to consider investing in a 2nd PC/Laptop knowing that it will never be connected to the internet. For added security on this device you could work from a thumb drive, at least do your backups to the thumb drive and store in a safe place. Don't forget about encryption.

Tranmontane,

You're biggest hope IMHO is that they deleted the files or partitions, or quick formatted them, rather than performing an often quite lengthy overwrite. Malware tools for overwriting disks may do a partial rather than complete overwrite, in case that was what was used.

On a conventional hard drive the heads that perform reads & writes float above the spinning platters where data's stored. The data itself is stored in tracks -- think of a vinyl record. Those heads may have a tiny bit of side to side play, so that some of the original data may survive after being overwritten, e.g. the head was to the right when it wrote the original data, but to the left when it over wrote that data. This is why erasure apps perform multiple passes. But it takes a recovery specialist to find that data, & those firms don't work cheap.

Drive/partition image backups work fine when you restore them to a drive to run recovery software like Magic Uneraser Home, but they need to be complete backups including any free space. A regular image backup will only archive data that's referenced in the file tables. If you've got image backups of drives that only show free space [rather than your files/folders] I assume they're complete [a regular image backup of an empty partition should be zero bytes].

Tranmontane,

Data that has been written over cannot be recovered except by hardware recovery tools that can "peel back" layers of magnetism. These tools are more the domain of special security forces, and you need the disks themselves, not the images.

File-data is recoverable only if the file was sequentially written to the disk. Parts of it that are not consecutive may either not be recovered, or sometimes they are recovered as nameless fragments that you have to fit together.

As recovery software keeps on improving and may in the future be able to do a better job, keep the images in a safe place.

Tranmontane, if you really want to know what is left on a harddrive and find any automated programs you try produces inconclusive results... use the drive sector viewing/editing function of something like HxD hex editor in the extras menu and manually scan through the drive and see what is still there! Obviously it will require a certain level of education/self-education to understand what you do find to determine results. If magnetic media is just formatted or quick-formatted the original content may still be there less the root directory and Master file table and partition table entries and such would be relatively easy to recover, but if the drive surface was overwritten then whatever was overwritten is lost perminantly.

It's a bit late now but to protect from malicious actions not all backups should be fully automatic since it could be used against you by automatically propogating initial malicous encryption or data corruption over to each backup media potentially causing the deleting of older good backups to make space for new corrupted backups. Do not let others know your entire backup scheme! Backup to different media types important stuff e.g optical and cloud (encrypted of course if content type warrents it) and do not keep all backup media online all the time as if the malicious actor can see media as network shares or drive letters or unallocated hard drives they can be expected to damage them in some way.

And yes I have retrieved recognisable files like JPEG files manually using HxD disk sector editor by selecting the sectors containing recognisable JPEG header to what looks like first blank cluster and copying and pasting it into a new files TAB and then saving that to other media as a .JPG file. It is hit and miss especially if the data on the damaged drive was fragmented in the first place. But if file data is still there if you are smarter than the recovery programs alogorithims that do fail to reconstruct the files then you can in all probability do better manually but it will be slooooow progress.

TK, RWW, John, and Jerri (and the "gentleman" who originally helpfully suggested "Maybe it was a crappy book" -- apparently since deleted....) thanks for all your suggestions.

I must say, coming from the days of DOS files, which I fairly often had to sort out (using Norton's "PC Tools") by going in there, and deleting all sorts of junk that had been written into the middle of files, including masses of "EOF" or End of File markers, in order to get the file to "run" properly after corruption (a fairly regular feature of life in those early days)... I do have some knowledge of the reconstitution of "ruined" files.

But indeed, it was a very time-consuming process even in those days (when I HAD more time). I suspect it would probably be even more so now. YES, it would have been a good idea to back up onto DVDs, for instance. But outright sabotage is not something that one normally has to consider, when writing the original files -- so perhaps there is a lesson for us all there.

I agree that probably automated "guesswork" recovery may not be the best way to get back MORE of the lost data, but by now I have accumulated a number of "data recovery" programmes, mostly from GOTD, so, with an IMAGE of each drive, I can -- if I have time, and sometimes big chunks of my data do re-appear -- try each in turn, till I find one that seems to work best.

But ultimately I am resigned to facing up to the fact that almost all of what I had recorded, may well have been lost. And it was "recorded" more than written, because it was pages and pages of the inadvertently funny utterances of my "foreign" ex-girlfriend, expressing her ideas in a language not yet her own -- with the all-important context provided by my notes at the time. So, no, it was far from "crappy", unnamed sir, and fame may unfortunately have eluded her, by my total inability to foresee the capacity for infamy of someone close to me.

Perhaps we should all learn from that mistake.

mike, Thanks, useful information to bear in mind...

I appreciate guys chipping in with various bits of information/viewpoints since, when I believe I have something useful to add to other people's comments or issues, I do the same.

Some of the comments here have been quite useful, others not so useful in my circumstances, although I appreciate everyone's contributions. Encryption, I meant to note before, of course would not have helped -- if the data is over-written it is over-written (and encryption would just make it even harder to get back). Ensuring the data was never online wouldn't have had any benefit -- these were three naked hard disks, taken out of the computer. The person involved could just have stolen them, or smashed them with a sledge hammer -- but no, they wanted to ensure I wouldn't notice for months -- till I needed to access one or other of them.

The most useful idea (even though it is not foolproof) was of course to back up to the cloud....

I am aware of the existence (possibly!) of tiny bits of data outside the scan of the read head, but I also know that the US$8,000 plus cost of even attempted recovery is almost certainly more than the possible profit I might make on the book.... though I'll probably never know.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who provided helpful thoughts.... Appreciated.

MikeR, Well, sure. It's a name, a title. 'Jaws' was about a shark, not only about a mouthpart. Microsoft Word should be called 'Paragraph'? 'Document'?

MikeR, At last someone has openly said that, contrary to the nitwits in microsoft, deleted and erased are NOT the same. It is possible to undelete (the word is restore) but never to unerase.
However, many people, especially software distributors, follow the microsoft idiots and confuse the two. To recover and restore are two stages and it does not matter if you confuse them but it does matter if you confuse undelete and unerase.