Getting Back Deleted Files

Reader Brent writes: I went on vacation last week and while I was gone, there was a power outage of some kind. I seem to have lost all my files, photos, videos and songs that were stored in my Maxtor 3100 USB hard drive. I did a properties check with the drive and found that it still states that there are 17GB of info on the drive, but the files are nowhere to be found. Can you help me recover them? I am getting desperate. Please help!

I've never heard of a power outage causing data loss like this, but a surge can do just about anything to delicate magnetic media. But partition tables are touchy things, and I am sure you're not the first person to have such a freak occurrence happen to you.

The good news is that the data is clearly there, as the properties check has indicated. So let's walk through the steps you should take in trying to recover the information.

First, try to repair the partition, which will give you all the data back in the same folders as it was in originally. TestDisk is a fabulous (and free) tool for doing this kind of operation. I don't have room to explain exactly how to use TestDisk, but you shouldn't have much trouble with it. Essentially you want to recover any damaged or deleted partitions and then try to access the disk again. If you need a more step-by-step walkthrough, this site has a brief tutorial.

If the partition recovery is unsuccessful, you'll need to move on to a specialized data recovery application. Basically these apps scour the hard drive for deleted files (remember, "deleted" doesn't mean "gone") and lets you recover them. There are at least 20 of these on the market, and I've used a good chunk of them over the years. They all tend to work about the same way and with the same degree of success. Just let the application run for a few hours, then come back to a screen filled with files the app can recover (plus files it can't).

Unfortunately none of these applications are free (trial versions will usually let you see if you have files that can be recovered but if you want to actually recover them, you have to pay).

Feel free to try any of these applications (the aforementioned site has a long list), but I can vouch for the $40 Executive Software Undelete, the $199 Ontrack EasyRecovery DataRecovery Professional, and the $50 QueTek File Scavenger. All three offer free versions for you to check out to see if they're going to work for you, before you shell out for them.

Good luck!