[tiktok]

OK, this is not a real data recovery disaster I'm teaching my class about data security and data recovery and I wanted to demonstrate this process for them.

Does anyone know of a good *free* program to do this? Even if it is limited (time or data size) that would be fine. I searched the threads here but many of them are several years old, so I thought there might be something newer available.

[BLHealthy4life]

if you go to iolo.com, they have a bunch of different security and data programs. I use their Drive Scrubber program and love it.

Maybe you will interested in the "Search and Recover" program?

They have free trials.
BL

[grumperfish]

For data backup I always use GetDataBack (has NTFS and FAT32 versions), although Stellar Phoenix is decent as well. Neither of these are free but they do have evaluation versions.


Freeware:
PC Inspector for FAT & NTFS comes with flash media recovery apps (no idea if it works with U3[ugh]-based usb drives though). I've used it in the past and it's not bad, although the two programs above are arguably better.

Testdisk is also free to use, but it's a bit complicated.

Restoration can be run off a floppy disk and requires no installation.

[tiktok]

Thanks guys, they look like exactly what I needed. I'll check them out later today.

[tiktok]

OK, I tried out those programs and did manage to recover deleted files with them. However, I couldn't get any to recover data from a formatted flash drive (even a quick formatted one). I don't know if the formatting process on a flash drive is different to a hard drive, but I didn't want to format my HD to find out! Unfortunately I have no floppy drives available either.

Has anybody had success at un-formatting a flash disk in the past?