The convenience of external hard drives is undeniable. They allow us to carry terabytes of data everywhere we go, they can be easily shared among many devices, and their installation could hardly be any simpler. Because of their ubiquitous nature, we have come to rely on them so much that we seldom consider just how fragile external hard drives are.
How many people know how to recover files from external hard drives and how many would simply panic, not knowing what to do? If you know how to recover data from external hard drives, you have much better chances to prevent the worst from happening and turn what could be a disastrous situation around.
Before you go online and download the first data recovery tool you come across pause for a minute and let us explain some of the most common causes of hard drive failure to help you successfully solve the underlying issue.
By using the wrong hard drive recovery tool, you could make your problem worse and lose any chance to recover your data. But before we get to the most common causes of a hard drive failure, we first need to touch upon how hard drives work.
Data recovery software is your best bet when it comes to recovering data from logically damaged hard drives. In this article, we list our top 11 favorite HDD recovery tools, and we encourage you to make your own choice. For the purposes of this recovery guide, we are going to focus only on the number one hard drive recovery tool we know: Disk Drill.
As you can see, data recovery with Disk Drill is a matter of three simple steps, so you have absolutely nothing to be afraid of, especially considering that Disk Drill can preview all deleted data for free.
Disk Drill also includes helpful hard drive management utilities that cover everything from data backup to hard drive health monitoring. Even though Disk Drill is the tool of choice for many IT professionals, it still manages to be just as accessible and easy to use as data recovery tools aimed at complete beginners.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery can recover deleted data from Internal and external hard drives, help you retrieve lost data from inaccessible partitions, and do all of this in just a few minutes and with 1 GB of lost or deleted data for free. The software supports most file formats and storage devices, and it has already been downloaded by over 2 million customers. Unlike Disk Drill, which runs on Windows and macOS, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery runs only on Windows, as the name suggests.
R-Studio is a family of data recovery tools designed to solve just about any data recovery scenario. R-Studio can recover data from all major file systems, perform raw file search, fix startup issues, perform data recovery over LAN, and much more. Its intended audience are technicians and network experts tasked with recovering data from corporate networks and business computers.
EaseUS Data Recovery is a well-designed application that can help you recover files from any hard drive with a few clicks. The free version recovers up to 2 GB of data, and you can always purchase a PRO license to enjoy unlimited recovery. Regardless of which version of EaseUS Data Recovery you use, you can always preview lost files before recovering them, which helps recover only important files and leave everything else behind. Over 100 real-life data loss scenarios are supported, including RAW HDD recovery and other trickly situations.
DiskGenius is an all-in-one hard drive management tool that can perform data recovery, back up important files, and partition internal and external hard drives. The tool is regularly updated, and you can download it free of charge from its official website. Just keep in mind that the free version is limited, so you may need to spend some money to unlock the features you need. The good news is that DiskGenius comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The hard drive data recovery software applications listed in this article can deliver great results, saving the day when dealing with many different kinds of hard drive failure. As effective as they are, you can increase your hard drive recovery success rate even more by following the few simple tips below:
If you want to recover files from an external hard drive but it is not showing up on your computer, you can use a third-party data recovery tool to complete the recovery. Follow these steps to recover an undetected external hard drive:
Also known as CMD, the Command Prompt provides you with much finer control over your operating system by allowing you to give your computer text commands. This comes in handy when dealing with data loss caused by malware, which often affects the attributes of files stored on internal and external hard drives alike, making them either invisible or impossible to open.
You can do this by typing in File History into the Windows search bar and clicking on 'Restore files using File History.' This will lead you to the Control Panel, where you can turn on File History. Ensure that you include your external hard drive among active file history locations.
You can lose data from your external hard drive for various reasons. While you can follow specific steps like maintaining multiple data backups or installing a reliable antivirus to protect your data, data loss can be pretty unexpected.
In such situations, you can turn to the methods mentioned in this article. Most of these data recovery solutions are inexpensive, easy, and generally risk-free if you create proper backups of your external hard drives.
With Disk Drill, external hard drive recovery is free if all you need is to recover 500 MB of data or less. In comparison, some professional data recovery services charge hundreds of dollars for just a few files.
Is it Possible to Restore Files From an External Hard Drive? Yes. You can recover files from external hard drives if they have been accidentally deleted. External hard drive recovery is possible even after formatting or if the hard disk is damaged. Due to the way modern operating systems handle file deletion and disk formatting, the files are still physically available even when logically inaccessible to the system. Through the use of data recovery software, the drive can be recovered, allowing you to restore the lost files.
Yes, it is possible to recover files that have been lost due to deletion or the formatting of an external hard drive. This can be accomplished because of the way modern operating systems handle data deletion on hard drives.
When you delete a file on a Windows system, logical access to the data is removed but the data remains physically on the disk. The space occupied by the deleted item is marked as available for future use by the operating system. Eventually, that space will be reused as new data is saved to the disk.
Until the original data is overwritten, data recovery software can repair the logical links and make the files and folders accessible by the OS and your applications. These specialized software tools scan the disk for deleted items and make them available again.
Click the Search for lost data button to start the scanning process. You can choose the type of scan to be performed, although the best recovery results will be achieved by allowing Disk Drill to run all of its scanning procedures automatically in the optimal order. You will see a status bar indicating the progress of the scan which can be paused and restarted at any time. Data can be recovered before the scan completes when the process is paused. Scan results can also be mounted as a virtual disk to make recovery even easier.
Disk Drill is a professional data recovery solution that is available for Windows and Mac systems. The tool can restore lost and deleted files and folders from virtually any kind of disk-based storage media.
At the heart of Disk Drill are powerful scanning algorithms that enable you to undelete files from any storage device, including an external hard drive. These algorithms can recover files in over 400 different file formats by searching your drive on a sector-by-sector basis and reconstructing items from their file signatures.
Running this command will recover deleted files to a temporary folder created on the external drive. This is less safe than saving the restored files to a new storage location as you can do with recovery software. See the FAQs at the end of this article for a full description of how to use this command.?Read also: How to Undelete/Recover Files Deleted by CHKDSK
Removing any infections may resolve issues with data access caused by the malware. Once the computer is virus-free, you can run data recovery software to get back the files that may have been deleted by the virus attack.?Read also: Recover Files Deleted by Avast Antivirus & Recover Norton Deleted Files
This tool will scan the disk and attempt to fix corrupt files. When the process completes, you will receive messages detailing its ability to find and fix your files.#4 Recover from previously made backups with your storage media or by connecting to your cloud backup providerUsing this method will only restore to the system state when the backup was created. Data recovery software can restore deleted files that were not included in the backup.Be Aware of Losing Data From Your External Hard DiskThere are many reasons that your external hard drive can experience data loss. Some of the most common are:
IMPORTANT POINT These are just some of the causes of data loss that may confront you. A critical point to remember is to immediately stop using the external storage device as soon as you suspect data loss has occurred. Failure to follow this guidance can lead to the deleted data being overwritten before you have a chance to recover it. Put the drive to the side and fire up your data recovery software.Why You Should Use External Hard Drive Data Recovery SoftwareThe main reason to use external hard drive recovery software is its reliability and ease of use when faced with a data loss scenario. While you may be able to get your files back with one of the other methods we have described above, chances are good that at some point they will not be sufficient to recover your lost data.
760c119bf3