Embedded Files
So the inevitable has happened and your hard disk has crashed - and you now see there is no backup (a backup you always planned but never executed just like the new year resolution).
I can directly give you a cost or I can guide you. I think in this world of DIY (Do it Yourself) - you should try a few tricks before reaching out to a vendor.
My name is Niladri Shekhar Dandapat and I work in the field of technology consulting. Don't worry - try my tips first and then if it doesn't work - have no fear I am here. Be very careful with recovery because 99.99 % of the vendors will make tall claims about recovery and give you zero result and also they will run a one time recovery operation after which your disk will anyways become corrupt making it ineligible for any more data recovery operation. So please please please read the article with a calm mind - don't rush through it.
There can only be six reasons your hard disk crashed - vendors and internet will say a lot of things and for a good reason - to extract the money out of your pockets.
So now the six reasons
Firmware or manufacturer faults
Electronic failure or power surge
Overheating
Mechanical or internal failure
Corrupt file
Human errors
Now two of the most common reason's are corrupt file and human error - I am going to elaborate on these two only, but that doesn't mean data recovery cant happen for the rest.
Corrupt File
Reasons -
Use of malicious and/or faulty apps
Accidental closure of programs
Unethical shut down
Symptoms
Corrupt or damaged files
Sudden system shut down
Force restart
Human Errors
Reasons -
Modifying system registry settings
Wrong OS installation
Alteration in system file attributes
Accidental deletion of files or directories
Symptoms
Accidental damage to hard disk, leading to permanent data loss
3 Points to remember about deleted data
Data is only erased from the table of contents of the drive(MFT)
Data is still right where you left it (deleted from)
It hasn't necessarily been Overwritten yet.
e.g. say you live in a 30 bhk with lot of furniture's and you cant go to every room to check which room has what furniture - so you maintain a list of the rooms and the furniture's present in the same - when you intend to replace one old bed with a new one what you do is you take the list and remove the bed from the list. So when the new bed comes it is then you throw the old bed out and replace it with a new one. Same for hard disk and data.
P.S. 30 bhk because your hard disk is 1 TB which is like 1024 GB so not 30 bhk 1024 bhk.
Hot to prevent writing over your data
Don't try to recover data from the same computer you are running the recovery attempts from
Don't use the same computer to search for data recovery solutions
Don't leave the device running or connected
Like your friend meets with an accident will you make him search for nearby hospital's ? or will you make him clean the house ? You will take him to hospital to see he gets immediate medical support. Same for your computer and hard disk.
Why not go for cheap vendors
It is cheap or free for a reason - they use free data recovery software's which even you can download and run - they damage the hard drive and make data recovery options impossible -bad sectors are made worse - the more a drive spins the heads try to read those bad sectors
Inaccurate scan results - skip over good data when it located a bad sector
Try to save time by skipping bad sectors with good data or making just one pass
How is Notitia Convalescence different -
Well first "hi" I am Niladri Shekhar Dandapat - this is what I do for data recovery
Make a full clone of the damaged drive
First scan to find lost data (three passes minimum - whole process for images, documents and videos take 7 days - for recovery only)
Once found copy only the correct data to recovery destination
Data is copied directly to cloud so you know all the time what is happening and what is the status.
Never ever - ever ever - ever never run recovery utilities on the original media.
Real data recovery is about data preservation first.
Now lets meet the bap of all data recovery software's and your cheap third grade vendor don't use them because they need technical knowledge, and good computers with powerful specs to run the software's on.
I have three systems with 16GB rams each and Rhyzen 9, Intel 9 and Intel 7 processors and I take 7 days minimum - your vendor will give it in 1 day - and you will get a few MB of data and a corrupted hard disk. Well worst case you don't want to spend money do it yourself.
Number one on the list is TestDisk and Photorec - mainly used to retrieve damaged partitions. Also useful in recovering a non-booting disk. This is a command line tool and is the core for any paid data recovery software. Any software that you buy for 200 to 700 USD has TestDisk at its core. Photorec was developed to accurately recover deleted images/photos and other graphic media files.
Features
TestDisk enables you to gather necessary information about a corrupted drive.
Recover deleted partitions.
It’s a cross-platform application that runs Linux, Windows Operating Systems, MacOS, and many more Operating System.
TestDisk can be used to re-build broken partition tables.
It is used to rewrite the corrupted MBR (Master Boot Record).
It can be used to backup partitions EFI GPT partitions.
Redo Backup and Recovery is one of the available data recovery utilities with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and released under the GNU GPL3. It is regarded as an easy-to-use tool even for newbies getting into Linux systems and have less knowledge about the Terminal commands.
Redo Backup and Recovery is available as an ISO file which can be used to create a bootable USB/CD to boot your PC. Since this tool is platform-independent, users can retrieve a lot more data from different partitions. Download Redo Backup and Recovery tool from the link below.
Redo Backup and recovery come with a few essential applications enabling you to carry out other tasks while recovering data. They include a text editor, browser, file manager, and Terminal.
Available for use as a bootable USB/CD.
It’s one of the few recovery utilities that make use of Partclone to clone disk partitions.
Knoppix is the best and most used data recovery software or Linux distribution for fixing a broken system. Knoppix is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD (Live CD) or a Live USB, one of the first of its kind for any operating system.
Knoppix was developed by Linux consultant Klaus Knopper. When starting a program, it is loaded from the removable medium and decompressed into a RAM drive. The decompression is transparent and on-the-fly.
LXDE, a lightweight X11 desktop environment (default for 6.0.1 and later), or KDE 3, a more feature-complete desktop which is the default for 5.3.1 and earlier releases.
MPlayer, with MP3 audio, and Ogg Vorbis audio playback support
Internet access software, including the KPPP dialer and ISDN utilities
The Iceweasel web browser (based on Mozilla Firefox)
The Icedove e-mail client (based on Mozilla Thunderbird)
GIMP, an image manipulation program
Tools for data rescue and system repair
Network analysis and administration tools
LibreOffice, a comprehensive office suite
Terminal server
Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) is a free and open-source Linux distribution with a command-line interface. TRK was designed for deployment as a live CD or live USB. The author of TRK, Tom Kerremans, includes in the distribution of various third-party software utilities for repairing damaged files, data recovery, resetting passwords, detecting computer viruses, and disk cloning.
TRK is specially equipped for repairing common problems in Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. To reduce disk space required, TRK uses a bespoke help command, trkhelp, instead of the man pages typical of Linux distributions. Preview build 396 was released in March 2014. A fork of TRK called Mango (MAssive Network GhOst) was released by Juan Carlos Pineda, modified to simplify cloning computers.
Consoles (accessed using alt+F1, etc.)
The ability to update itself (antivirus definitions/drivers) if burned onto a CD-RW
Data Recovery Tools
Clone Windows over a network
Antivirus Scanner
Read/Write to NTFS partitions through ntfs-3g
SystemRescueCD is based on Gentoo Linux and can be used as a bootable CD-ROM or USB drive for repairing unbootable or otherwise damaged computer systems after a system crash. The tool provides numbers of data recovery tools to rescue data, creating and editing partitions, Hard-disk testing, and many more features.
GNU Parted and GParted to partition disks and re-size partitions, including FAT32 and NTFS
fdisk to edit the disk partition table
PartImage, disk imaging software which copies only used sectors
TestDisk to recover lost partition and PhotoRec to recover lost data
FSArchiver a system tool that allows you to save the contents of a file-system to a compressed archive file
Support for many file systems, including full NTFS read/write access (via NTFS-3G) as well as FAT32 and Mac OS HFS
Support for Intel x86 and PowerPC systems, including Macs
Support for Windows registry editing and password changing from Linux
Can boot FreeDOS, Memtest86+, hardware diagnostics and other boot disks from a single CD
So we came to the end of the article - a little bit about me - my name is Niladri Shekhar Dandapat, and I run my own company. If you have reached here and you are still stuck - drop me a message in
What I will need from you -
The hard disk and/or the laptop
a google drive account with a memory limit that you want to recover (ideally 15GB is given free but if you have 1 TB of data recovered I will need 1 TB of google drive space. (Data recovered is different from disk size - you have a 1 TB of hard disk and out of that only 300 GB has data then the data recovery size will be roughly 80% of it - so 80% of 300 GB is 240 GB)
Time to run the entire recovery (approximately 7 days)
What to expect and what not to expect
In worst case scenario your folder structure is lost so recovery will happen for file types - 1 folder for all JPEG images, 1 folder for all AVI files - since the whole process is automated I wont be able to check files and sort them - for e.g. there may be a movie which is 1.5 gb and you can say I dont want to recover that - unfortunately in the recovery process the system dont go and check if it is a movie or is it a personal video - it just checks AVI file and restores it to the cloud. so you either recover all AVI files or no AVI files at all - same goes for other file types as well.
Most of the cases data is corrupted by virus and hence wont recover any DLL or EXE or any other form of machine run files because there is a chance or corrupting my own systems if the virus or the worm gets into the recovery system
Ideally I create three clones and run the recovery on those clones - once your recovery is done - I will delete these clones - so please dont come to me after 1 month and say that I need the recovery done again on the clone - each clone size is huge and hard disk space is limited - once recovery is done - the clones are deleted I cant recover from the clone again. I will return the hard disk as is and you can keep it for future use.
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