Is Hard Drive Recovery Software Worth the Expense?
If your hard drive loses data, did you know that all hope is not lost? Hard drive recovery software is available to go in and retrieve your lost data, even if you accidentally formatted the drive! While this sounds miraculous, it does come with a price. Software developers want to help you recover your data but they don't do it simply to be nice. They need to recover their investment in the technology and that technology isn't cheap. Is harddrive recovery software worth the expense?
First, what's your data worth to you? If all of your business information is lost, your livelihood could be threatened. If you lost the only copy of your 100,000 word memoir, are you prepared to rewrite it? What about the only video of your baby's first steps? Or your $3000 MP3 collection?
Okay, we've established that your data is valuable and worth retrieving. Now, let's take a look at some of the hard drive recovery software programs on the market today to see if they are capable of recovering your data and at what price.
Hard drive recovery software works based on the way Windows saves and deletes data in the first place. When a file is deleted or a disk re-formatted the data isn't actually erased at that point in time. Only the reference to the file is removed from a master index. When new data is written to the hard disk, the data won't overwrite areas of the hard disk that have legitimate, indexed files. It will be placed in areas that are considered "free space" which could be an area that has your old, deleted file. When the deleted file is finally overwritten by another file or program, it goes away for good.
In between being removed from the index and being replaced by another program or data, there's a window where harddrive recovery software can go in and recover the file.
How much does hard drive recovery software cost? It varies depending on the program's capabilities. You can get limited-feature downloads for little to no cost or you could spend hundreds of dollars for fully-featured hard drive recovery software suites suitable for recovering data from large hard drives, RAIDs, and enterprise servers. In between these extremes are harddrive recovery software programs suitable for the average computer user in the $60 to $100 range.
So which hard drive recovery software is right for you? It depends on the extent of your loss. If you accidentally deleted a single file and emptied the Recycle Bin before you realized your mistake, you might try one of the freebies first. If you've accidentally reformatted your hard drive, you might try a program such as RecoverMyFiles or Hard Drive Mechanic which are both in the $70 price range. If you're an IT professional who needs a disaster recovery solution, you'll want a suite of hard drive recovery software tools for all of the data recovery challenges your organization will face.
Harddrive recovery software comes in all price ranges and is worth the expense so long as it can get your precious data back.
