Prog to restore hard drives: a review of the best

Naturally, accidental and intentional deletion of files destroys information previously stored on hard disks, which can be restored with the help of special utilities. But you can also find cases of fast or full formatting of hard drives, when the data is supposed to be permanently deleted, not to mention the damage to the hard disks themselves. What to do in this case? Here come to the rescue programs to restore hard drives. You can download free of charge mostly simple utilities. However, even they help, as they say, to bring the disc to life. Consider the most popular software products, including free and distributed, and paid utilities.

How does the process of deleting files from the hard drive occur?

Before considering the main topic, we will make a small digression to the theoretical part and see how the information is deleted. In Windows-based systems, there are two ways: removing to the Recycle Bin and without it. In the first case, the files are simply moved to the area reserved on the hard drive, so it's easy to restore them from the Recycle Bin.

In the second case, the file is renamed, under which the first character in the title changes to unreadable ($). If in the process of working in clusters where such a file is located, the overwrite was not performed, you can also restore the information.

The situation is worse with fast or full formatting of disks and partitions, as well as with situations when the hard drive starts to "crumble" or is simply exposed to physical damage. Many users mistakenly believe that it is impossible to restore files in this case, they say, this is only possible for professional experts. Nothing like this! If you use, for example, the same programs for the recovery of Seagate Barracuda hard drives , which have had a lot of problems with their time, such a process can be implemented by anyone, even an unprepared user. And quite elementary.

Programs for recovering hard disks after formatting: can this be done?

In case of fast formatting of the hard drive, the partition tables are overwritten, and at full - also checking the disk surface with the subsequent correction of bad sectors. At the same time, it's not about factory low-level formatting at all.

This is what allows many developers to create programs for recovering hard drives that seem to produce the reverse process. This gives the same recovery effect. But first things first.

Best hard drive recovery programs

As for the most popular utilities to date, an exemplary list might look like this:

• Victoria HDD;
• R.Saver and R-Studio;
• HDD Regenerator;
• Acronis Recovery Expert and Active Partition Recovery Pro;
• Hetman Partition Recovery;
• Zero Assumption Recovery.

Naturally, it is impossible to bring a complete list, because today hundreds of such software products can be found. But we will dwell on these utilities in more detail.

Victoria HDD

If we consider the most popular programs for the recovery of hard disks and disk partitions, of course, the leadership belongs to one of the most powerful modern utilities called Victoria HDD, the developer of which is Sergey Kazansky.

The program has five levels of testing the hard drive, is able to detect and display bad areas, fix errors, build surface state graphs, measure performance, etc. The operating modes also look interesting. The application can be run in a regular graphical environment, or you can use a somewhat unusual DOS-mode. By the way, it is with this test that the most powerful effect is achieved.

R.Saver and R-Studio

These two programs for recovering hard drives from flash drives work just fine and are very similar to each other. They can be used even in the form of portable versions.

The main advantage of these utilities is that they support almost all known to date file systems and are able to recover data on any type of media, including even formatted or corrupted memory cards.

HDD Regenerator

This utility is relatively new among all programs. It is designed specifically to restore bad sectors and, as the developers themselves say, even for resuscitation of the hard drive surface.

Here, the latest technology of the so-called magnetization reversal is used, which allows to completely restore the hard drive and the information that was written on it earlier. It works, however, only in the DOS-mode, which many cause some perplexity. In addition, the technology itself looks almost unrealistic, because some do not realize how it is possible to remagnetize the surface programmatically. Nevertheless, all who encountered it, express only admiration - the application is able to reanimate even completely "dead" disks.

Acronis Recovery Expert and Active Partition Recovery Pro

Before us, two representatives of the family of utilities for HDD recovery. The peculiarity of these applications is that they support a large number of file systems and hard drives.

In addition, they provide a mode for creating bootable media, with which you can fix a lot of problems if the start of the operating system from a problematic hard drive is impossible.

True, the first utility is paid, the second is not. But the second application is also interesting because it can be run from under DOS, and from under Windows.

Hetman Partition Recovery

Another utility for recovering disks, USB drives or memory cards and information stored on them, is interesting in that it can work with all types of virtual partitions. Needless to say, the data can be restored even after full formatting.

But the most important thing is that the program can work both in manual mode and in "Wizard" mode, which allows any user to use automation of the entire recovery process.

Zero Assumption Recovery

Finally one more small and fairly simple application, abbreviated as ZAR. This program is primarily intended for restoring FAT and NTFS file systems , although it can also be used for Linux. For users of Windows-systems it will do just fine.

But here it is worth considering that in this case it is solely about restoring information (even from bad sectors). The program on the hard disk does not make any corrections after the analysis.

Conclusion

Of course, only the most basic programs for recovering hard disks were considered here. When choosing a program, one should be guided by the situation itself, that is, choose which operation should be applied (restoring information or fixing failures on the hard drive itself), and only then decide on the use of this or that utility.