Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Troubleshooting, Windows x64
Portable DiskDigger provides free file recovery for Windows
by Lee Mathews Feb 18th 2009 at 1:00PM
It never hurts to have one more data recovery utility in your portable toolkit, especially when it's free.
Like Recuva, Disk Digger is dead simple to use, and does a good job at recovering the deleted files most users really care about - photos, music, videos, and documents. The preview pane supports most image types and some documents, and you can choose to recover a portion of files DiskDigger finds. Scanning speed and restoration success was on par with Recuva in my testing.
On Vista and Windows 7 make sure you run DiskDigger as an Administrator, otherwise you might run into problems. Though I received an error message after launching it on Vista Ultimate x64, it ran without further problems after clicking continue and did a good job locating and restoring lost files.
In case you have issues getting the file from the author's page, it's mirrored at Snapfiles as well.
Like Recuva, Disk Digger is dead simple to use, and does a good job at recovering the deleted files most users really care about - photos, music, videos, and documents. The preview pane supports most image types and some documents, and you can choose to recover a portion of files DiskDigger finds. Scanning speed and restoration success was on par with Recuva in my testing.
On Vista and Windows 7 make sure you run DiskDigger as an Administrator, otherwise you might run into problems. Though I received an error message after launching it on Vista Ultimate x64, it ran without further problems after clicking continue and did a good job locating and restoring lost files.
In case you have issues getting the file from the author's page, it's mirrored at Snapfiles as well.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 2:04PM on 2-18-2009
Even GetDataBack from Runtime.org is a good solution for data recovery...
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Fred Thompson said 6:39PM on 2-18-2009
"It never hurts to have one more..." except there needs to be a reason to have more than what you already have. This is like Recuva so you should have it...huh?!?!
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Lee Mathews said 6:42PM on 2-18-2009
And if Recuva doesn't find that file you were looking for, then what? Give up?
If one app doesn't work, try again with another.
minibar said 10:33PM on 2-18-2009
A glance at DiskDigger release notes indicates it functions differently than Recuva in that it bypasses the filesystem and also that it is still under active development. I'm not sure if there is any test case where Recuva failed and DiskDigger succeeded, but bypassing the file system could theoretically cause it to work on media with damaged or unrecognized file systems.
More research would've improved the author's post considerably, but less research seems to be the trend.
Fred Thompson said 2:22AM on 2-19-2009
Lee, that is flawed reasoning. Disc Digger doesn't provide functionality that is not in Recuva. If it were EasyRecovery or R-Studio, yes, but that's not the case.
minibar, Recuva is actively developed and does support reading direct sectors and some crude support for damaged media. That's really a different class of tool, though, such as the ones that repeatedly read optical discs until they get a good sector.
Mike said 9:17AM on 2-19-2009
I keep a flash drive laying around with a deleted partition table just to see how useful these apps are.
So far, Data Doctor Recovery does the best job out of any of them, which explains why it costs money.
torrenters beware though...there's a nasty infected version of it running around out there too.
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SweetW said 5:53PM on 3-20-2009
Today a friend handed me a 2GB flash drive that had had an encounter with a virus. It was full of personal photos and documents. All the file names were replaced with garbage characters, and no file would open.
I use Recuva all the time, and have always had good success with it. But this was different. Recuva only returned the lately-deleted virus files. Because all the other files were not deleted, Recuva couldn't find them. Windows saw that they were there, and saw how big they were - it just couldn't access them.
So I googled and found DiskDigger, and the first time I ran it, it recovered hundreds of photos and personal documents - some of them priceless.
So, yes, I would recommend you have DiskDigger. I will keep it, thank you.
For others searching a similar problem: when I tried to access any file on the drive, Win (XP and Vista) would return: incorrect parameter.
Thank you to those who create these quality apps and share them.
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