We are going to be starting a new series here at Runtime Software; Case Studies. Real life data recovery scenario’s that we can hopefully help you with.
Case Study #1 – Recovering from a deleted partition
Hard Drive: secondary drive – 128GB SSD with music on it.
Operating System: Windows 7 – 32bit
Software used: GetDataBack for NTFS
Chance of Recovery: 100% as long as nothing else was written to the drive
Notes: This drive is the secondary drive. If the drive you need to recover is your primary drive, that will be covered in a future case study
Be sure to run the software as Administrator (right click on the GetDataBack icon and select Run As Administrator).
In the first step of the software, select Quick Scan.
Select your physical drive from the list of available drives and click Next. If you do not see your drive, close the software and see step 2 again.
When you get to step 2, select the top file system and click Next.
In step 3, you should be able to see your files that were in your partition. You have the ability to open them and test them, however in order to save your files, you will need to purchase the software from our website at http://www.runtime.org/buy_now.htm.
Notes: The software can not fix or repair your drive. You will need another place to save the data to. This can be another internal drive or even an external USB for Firewire drive. You will need to purchase the software before you save the data. The demo allows you to ensure the files are recoverable before you need to make a purchase.
If you run into problems with any of these steps, let us know right away so we can help you.
We get this question a lot. What is the difference between the demo version of your software and the paid version? The demo version is only there so you can see your files and even open some of them. The only time you should ever purchase the software is after you have run the demo, you can see the files you want to recover and you are ready to recover them.
The only difference between the demo and the full version is the ability to save your data. This is true for GetDataBack, DiskExplorer, Captain Nemo, RAID Reconstructor, NAS Data Recovery and RAID Recovery for Windows. If you are purchasing the software, you have already tested it and are sure it can do what you need it to do.
We have a new video tutorial for our NAS Data Recovery software in three different locations, YouTube, at Vimeo, and an iPad/iPhone 1080p version here.
The YouTube version is only 720P and is below:
Vimeo has a 1080p version and is below, this works on iPad and iPhones as well:
If you have any questions about this software, please call us at 808-239-2202, or email us at support@runtime.org.
GetDataBack for FAT and NTFS were updated to version 4.02 today. If you have directory with bad file names, there is now an “Ignore All” on “Could Not Create Directory” prompts.
We just want to warn people about formatting their drives in Windows Vista and Windows 7. If you uncheck the option for quick format, the operating system does a full destructive format, making data recovery impossible once it is finished.
So unless you are giving your drive away, or selling it, do not do a full format if there is a chance you will need the data on the drive, as the data will no longer be there, or recoverable.
Be sure you have the option for quick format selected.
Q: After upgrading to Windows 7, I can not longer see my drives in any of your software.
A: This is due to the UAC that Windows Vista and Windows 7 have in place. In order to bypass this, you can simply right click on the icon of the program you are running and selecting “Run as administrator”. You will then have access to the physical drives at this point.
You must do this even if you are the administrator of the computer. If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to contact us.
Many user are asking us if there is a “verify” for a backup created in DriveImage XML. There isn’t, and this is for good reasons.
Let’s think for a second what a verify should do. It should confirm that the content of a backup is identical with the original data. It should also confirm that the backup files were written correctly to the media.
A backup program doing a verify can only compare what it thinks the data is to what it thinks the data in the backup is. Suppose the backup program makes a mistake when it first writes the backup. It will make the same mistake again once it verifies the backup. Therefore, you should never trust a backup program’s own verify. The only proper and recommended way to verify a backup is to restore it to a new disk.
Comparing backup and original data is not even possible because DriveImage XML uses VSS “hot-imaging”. This means the data is no longer the same an instance after the backup started.
As for the verification the backup files being written without error to the hard drive, with today’s hard drive technology it makes no sense to re-read data written to a disk, as this is verified on a hardware level. There is no need for a program to engage in such a time-consuming task.
You should only trust a backup you have been able to restore, and where a compare of the original drive with the restored drive is satisfactory.
When you give a computer to a friend or co-worker, or even sell it, it still has all of your data on it. Even if you format the drive. If you do not believe me, try it for yourself. Take a drive with data on it that you no longer need, format it, then run GetDataBack. You will see all of your data. This will not work however if you are using Vista.
Vista has changed they way a format works and now does a low level format. You can find this information at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961. This is good and this is bad. If you accidentally format a drive in Windows Vista, that data is gone forever. Not even a hardware recovery company can recover the data for you.
We are going to show you how to use DiskExplorer to low level format a drive so that no data can ever be recovered from it. This is useful when you want to give a drive to someone or sell your computer. You will low level the drive, then install Windows. None of the data that was on the drive can be recovered.
WARNING – THIS WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA ON YOUR DRIVE. IF YOU DO THIS BY ACCIDENT, THERE IS NOT A WAY TO UNDO IT. THIS IS A PERMANENT SOLUTION.
