It’s happened to all of us every once in a while. We find ourselves in the situation where we accidently deleted a file. (Yes, it happens to me too! lol). Everyone claims to have an undelete program that actually works, but they all vary in their ability to recover a file intact.
This is why I wanted to bring notice to something that just recently happened. My daughter (2 years old) decided to play on my computer and through some act of a perfect storm, she managed to reformat my one of my Pegasus R6 Drive Partitions. The only problem was I had done a ton of work earlier today prior to picking her up and my backups would have only been good up until last night, thus causing me to lose over 6 hours of work. Restoring a backup was NOT a solution in this particular case.
I had a plan. Since she reformatted the drive, (I was hoping it was a quick format) [thank goodness it was], I fired up a little known product called Power Undelete. Fingers crossed, I started the scan and recover. (3.5 TB is a lot of data to recover).
Not only did it recover the data hours later, but a verification against last nights backup showed only the files that I had changed were different. So here was the real test. Bring up those files and see how accurate it was.
All the files were not only intact, but they were good! No data lost. I then went further and did a checksum and filename comparison (as many undelete products have the ability to recover all or part of a file, but massively screw up filenames, thus rendering them useless). Not only did the comparison come up clean on over 229,000+ files, everything was intact. Check summing showed 0 errors.
Keep in mind this was on a Promise R6 Thunderbolt array in RAID 5 so that could have played major havoc due to RAID algorithms as implemented on the RAID array.
I will have to say that not only was I very lucky, but I now have complete faith in this product.
I completely recommend it to anyone who has this issue. Very rarely does an application perform like this. The only other one that does is Auslogics Boostspeed.
After the recovery, I scheduled a scandisk and ran it. 0 errors. So as far as I’m concerned, not only is this product solid, it’s worth every penny. Remember, it’s not the cost of the hardware, it’s the value of the data and lost time. Luckily, I have a backup computer, but it wouldn’t have helped in this case.
It looks like I’m going to be doing real-time sync to my other array over Gig-E to protect against this in the future, but in the meantime, if you ever have an issue where you accidently deleted or reformatted a file, Power-Undelete is the way to go.
Here’s the catch though. You need to have it ready, because if you lose your data, putting any data on your hard drive is a risk of corrupting any lost files you may have had. So downloading and installing the software after you have lost the data can effectively cause you to make the data you want to recover unrecoverable.
So many people say, “It won’t happen to me”.. so let me ask you a question. When was the last time you did a backup? I’ll bet it’s been a while. In this case, a backup wouldn’t have helped me. I would have still been out 6 hours-ish of work. Work I really wouldn’t want to redo or even attempt to redo.
The question is.. is the lost time and data worth the price of the software? That’s your choice to decide.. especially if you’re up against a deadline (you business people know what I’m talking about)…. I’ve been there.