When Hard Drive Disaster Strikes, Think R-Studio
A few times in the past 20 years, I've lost a hard drive or two. Like most, especially when the cost of data storage was prohibitively high and much slower, I was a little behind on the backing up of my data. One time, it was a power outage while writing to a hard drive, another time I think a client of mine dropped the hard drive, another time, who knows what happened -- Windows could no longer recognize it.What all of these scenerios had in common was they weren't just inconveniences, but real weeks worth of work were lost, seemingly instantly.... at least I thought. With client deadlines looming and a bunch of video and web projects locked away in a mysterious maze buried in a pretty reliable external hard drive, crunch time was quickly turning into "panic mode."
Immediately, I played it cool and went online looking for a solution, a FREE software solution first, of course. There was some albeit questionable freeware, or free trials of data recovery software I found. I tried three different software packages that couldn't even find the hard drive, so recovery of any data was out of the question with these "solutions", of course. One trial version made sure I wouldn't forget them anytime soon by sending me a proliferation of unsolicited spam emails.
A little more anxious, I finally stumbled upon R-Tools Technology Inc., http://www.drive-image.com/. I downloaded their Windows drive recovery solution, "R-Studio", which came with a free trial that would give me a preview of all the files it found, a list of what it thought it could restore, and a limited capability of restoring I think 10 MBs. I needed to restore NTFS, so there was an option for that particular need.
Please excuse the fact I do not have any screenshots, thankfully, I am using a fairly new computer on Windows 7, so I have not had the need for this product in a few years. I installed the trial version and gave it a go. Within 10 minutes, I had R-Studio installed and up on my screen. The interface looked different than the other trials -- cleaner, intuitive, and easier to follow. It looked and felt professional. Still smarting from my previous 3 experiences from other software that made its way through what I thought was a pretty good "crap detector", I clicked a few buttons to recognize any hard drives R-Studio could find to scan and waited, expecting the same, helpless result.
Start the Marching Band -- My Data Was Recovered!
Instead, up popped the drive that none of the other software programs or Windows XP, could even recognize! I think a parade began a marching song in the background, echoes of a choir could be heard singing "hallelujah!" I clicked the drive icon and it began to scan its files right away. Within minutes, I stopped the scan to see if any progress had been made -- sure enough, there were my folders and a list of all my files. ALL of them! I restored a few files and anxiously opened them. One was an Adobe Premiere project file, the other files were video clips and a few Word files. I loaded the files, opened them, looked them over -- PERFECT! Not a missing pixel, not a sign of a glitch.I wasted no time, I went to R-Studio's website, paid for the full version. The total cost of this software lifesaver was a little less than $50. They sent me a registration key and I unlocked my trial program to the full version. I had about 400 GBs of data that needed to be restored and R-Studio recovered all of it to another external hard drive in less than an hour. I can't say enough about the quality of this product and how much time and trouble it saved me. Literally weeks of work and it kept me from missing some pretty important customer deadlines. It even found some deleted files I had thought were lost but I had accidentally deleted.
I would recommend R-Studio and any of there products. Their program simply stood well above the other solutions I looked into, some much more expensive than R-Studio.
Best Data Recover Solution for Your Money
I subscribed to their product update emails, which I get no more than once every few months. Their last email to me let me know of the improvements and updates their awesome software team had been working on:New features:
+ Support for ReFS (Resilient File System), a new local file system Microsoft introduced in its Windows Server 2012.
+ Support for Windows Server 2012 OS.
+ R-Studio Technician: Integration with DeepSpar Disk Imager, a professional HDD imaging device specifically built for data recovery from hard drives with hardware issues. Such integration provides R-Studio with a low-level fine-tuned access to drives with a certain level of hardware malfunction. Moreover, it allows disk imaging and analyzing be performed simultaneously. That is, any sector R-Studio accesses on the source disk will be immediately copied to a clone disk and any other data recovery operation will be made from that clone disk avoiding further deterioration of the source disk and great reduction in processing time. Read more on our page Integration with Hard Drive Recovery Hardware http://www.r-studio.com/DiskRecoveryHardware.shtml .
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http://www.r-tt.com/cgi-bin/Newsletter
The latest version of R-Studio (v. 6.2) can be downloaded from our Web page at
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Data_Recovery_Download.shtml
R-Drive Image software and more information on website and forum:
Site: http://www.drive-image.com
Forum: http://forum.r-tt.com/r-drive-image-5-1-5101-t8378.html
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