Recovery software recommendation

A while back, I was transferring a bunch of shows downloaded via dvarchive.

Suddenly the PC said it couldn't detect a file system on drive in my rickety old external enclosure. This 300GB drive was full of shows. Some I wanted to keep, some I hadn't seen yet. All my attempts to coax the drive back to life failed.

I spent several days researching how to fix the file system, but had no real luck. Finally, I found:

"GetDataBack for NTFS" from Runtime Software.

It had a free trial in that it would do everything to find data, but wouldn't recover them. I ran it and 90 minutes later it found every file, with its original name. It also found several other interesting parts of the disk. I registered a copy ($79) and was able to enable the "copy" function without having to rescan the drive.

With the low reliability factor of USB external drives, this program is a necessity.

Actually I bought SpinRite before this. It only repairs physical damage to the disk. There were no bad sectors per se, just a damaged file system. All the software I found (e.g. Norton Emergency Repair) requires that you make a repair disk before the crash so that the file system can be restored, but I didn't help me in this scenario.

So, after buying and running SpinRite and finding what I pretty much expected, that the disk was OK physically, I emailed GRC, and they confirmed that SpinRite can't repair damaged file systems.

But to be fair, GetDataBack for NTFS didn't fix it either. I had to copy all the files off the disk. Then I deleted/rebuilt/formatted the partition and copied them back. So in this case I had to find 300GB of available storage to hold the files until they could be restored to the original disk.

But, the effort was worth it. I got every file back.