What if you don't have a backup?

If you have a hard disk with important data that you don't back up, you're taking a big risk. I know, who has the time to do backups?

Sometimes Murphy's Law strikes before you get a chance. I had a drive that was a bit old and was starting to go.

I searched the web for data recovery products and services. There are companies that specialize in recovering lost drives that have been formatted, crashed or smashed. Those are expensive.

I decided to try out Data Rescue PC. It has a free version that tells you what it can recover, and it showed I could get back the majority of my files. I bought the full version, which makes a bootable CD. It's good to have a 2nd drive you can copy files to, rather than restore to the same drive that got you in trouble in the first place.

I hooked up a newly formatted drive & booted the Data Rescue CD. It takes a while to scan your bad drive, but if you can get your files back it's worth the wait. After a scan, it can save the scan results (another reason to have a good drive connected) so you can restore some files now, and others later.

It will rate the files it finds with a probability of whether it can successfully restore them. If your drive does go bad, don't mess around with recovery tools that try to fix it. I'd prefer a non-invasive program, which is why I chose Data Rescue.

Data Rescue performed as advertized. There were some files that didn't make it, but the majority survived. Whew!

I've learned my lesson- I'm backing up my new drive!