Recover My Files

I had spent 6+ hours the previous day updating a large excel file. I had inserted new calculations to include a good number of fairly complicated vlookup calculations. Today I accidently overwrote the entire file with an older one that had the same name. Needless to say I wasn't looking forward to updating all the calculations all over again. I had heard of programs that could recover deleted files but wasn't sure if there was a program that could recover overwritten files. I decided to try 'Recover My Files' with the hope that it might be able to recover the overwritten file. I recovered a lot of excel files. I was losing hope as I had checked through most of the recovered files. One of the last ones I checked turned out to be the overwritten file. What's more, there was no lost data. 'Recover My Files' saved me at least 6 hours of calculation rework and prevented me from getting a big headache. I highly recommend it!

Good Package.

Problem: corrupted Western Digital external USB 60GB hard drive – “RAW” directory not recognized and files not accessible. Before purchasing a recovery package I tested several “trial” products purporting a high success rate in recovering FAT files that included Stellar Phoenix FAT&NTFS (does not provide preview), Data Doctor Recovery FAT, PC Inspector File Recovery, and ZMeil 1.1.
The “trial” download version of RecoverMyFiles version 3.98 appeared to recover files. However, the big downside was instead of the disk’s original tree directory, the recovery program produced a long list of renamed files bearing no resemblance to the original file names. This may be ok for small amount of data but makes it very difficult if you have a disk with lots of data. I was reluctantly willing to live with this if original photographs were recoverable. After making purchase for full version, I had to rescan the 60GB hard drive that contained a little over 55GB of data and it took over twelve hours with almost a complete failure in recovering the data (jpeg, PDF, txt, html, doc,etc.). Thousands of files were listed as recovered but without original file name, I had to go through long list and click on individual files to preview. Files that had appeared intact in trial version were either missing or damaged. You read right. Twelve hours with a near 100% recovery failure! (There were no error messages indicating a problem during the process.)

Desperate to recover crucial photographs recently downloaded onto the disk for upcoming publication, I hit the web again and stumbled upon a Washington-Post article on GetDataBack (Runtime Software). After reading the review I went to the product web site and downloaded the free trial version. Without a doubt had I come across this program during my original search, I would have immediately purchased this product, saving time and frustration. The GetDataBack for FAT files full version scanned the hard drive in approximately 2.5 hours, producing the entire tree directory (all folders and files). More importantly, each and every file, thousands worth, were intact with no corrupted or missing files, providing further evidence that RecoverMyFiles fails miserably in attempts to recover FAT files.