Q: I'm trying to salvage data from a hard drive; Windows can get to some directories, but with others it just sits there and thinks when I try to open them. Any options?
A: The situation this longtime reader found himself in often has no happy ending: Disk corruption and disk crashes have an ugly history of eating data. But this time around, a free app managed to liberate files left inaccessible by a disk breakdown.
Based on an earlier recommendation at the Lifehacker blog, I suggested the reader try Piriform's Windows-only Recuva. It's free to use, although you're welcome to pay the London firm (also known for its CCleaner Windows utility) $24.95 for a professional version. You also can — and should — download its "portable" edition, which you can run off a separate flash drive.
My correspondent reported back that with the drive plugged in to a second computer, he could run Recuva off that PC and have it scoop files out of those damaged directories. Reviewers at PCMag and PCWorld have also rated Recuva highly, especially for more routine file-undelete procedures.
If you have only just started seeing signs of trouble, you could start with the drive-maintenance apps included with Windows. Win 8 makes it relatively easy to create a USB flash drive with a basic disk-repair toolkit; in Windows 7, Microsoft's setup routines assume you'll use a blank CD or DVD for the job.
If you use a Mac, you can also begin your troubleshooting with a built-in tool, Apple's Disk Utility, that you can run from the system DVD or USB drive that came with your computer or off the separate recovery partition on newer models.
If Disk Utility doesn't work, the consensus among Mac experts continues to point to Alsoft's DiskWarrior. At $99.95, it's not cheap but this Kingwood, Texas-based developer's app has drawn repeated compliments over the last decade or so from the likes of TidBITS and Macworld.
Anytime error messages or failed file transfers suggest your computer's disk is losing its grip on reality, the first thing to remember is to avoid writing anything else to the disk. Most of the time, disk corruption first involves damage to the computer's records of where on the drive it's stashed which bits; the files themselves remain intact, but without those catalog records the computer won't know to avoid scribbling over them. That's why all of the tools can be run from a separate disk or at least a separate partition.
Once they've done a read-only inspection of the troubled disk, they can start to rebuild catalog records.
With a current set of backups, you don't have to sweat these scenarios. Windows and OS X each include good-enough backup options, and you can also use online services that are either free or cheap; of those I tried back in November, I continue to like Backblaze and Mozy.
Without backups, you could find yourself in the same tight spot as a friend who had a laptop's drive go bad as he was halfway through writing a 500-page book. He wound up spending four figures to have the data-recovery service Kroll OnTrack rescue his files with specialized software and hardware; the service wound up getting a nice shout-out in the book's acknowledgments.
TIP: PUT A BACKUP DRIVE ON YOUR WI-FI ROUTER
If your wireless router features a random USB port or two, odds are you can plug a drive into that and use it as a centralized backup option. (See, for instance, Apple's AirPort Extreme and Asus's RT-N66U.) Pop in a high-capacity flash drive, adjust the router's settings if necessary, and you can begin automatically backing up critical data over your wireless network to that drive.
(Because this is computing we're talking about, there's an acronym for this kind of thing: NAS, short for "network attached storage.") But if you enable a feature like this, keep any options for remote access disabled. That Asus model I mentioned (one I bought myself after seeing it solidly recommended) shipped with a vulnerability that allowed outsiders to snoop around connected backup drives if one of a handful of cloud-sync features had been enabled. Fortunately, I'd left them off; Asus has since shipped a firmware update to close that flaw.
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