Monday, January 28, 2013

Recuva data rescue review


The outpouring of concern over my losing all the footage from one of the most implausible adventures of the 21st century was overwhelming. The letters arrived from all corners of the globe. But never worry! I'm too obsessed with the past and my ego would not allow the loss of all these photos of my crippled feet and Bakeapple or Bunchberries and birds and hundreds of pictures of my bell bottom pants. I decided to get serious. There was at least $1000 worth of music on that drive not to mention irreplaceable pictures of me wearing 70s clothes in Labrador. But Three different computers coughed and laughed when I tried to get that hard drive to mount. The computer repair place looked at me like I was trying to dub a John Denver cassette tape from 1982 to Blueray DVD. Another failure. I even put the thing in the freezer hoping it would work but it didn't. Maybe I should've baked it at 350 for an hour. The external drive had no fan so it always would overheat. I was a fool to use it to edit video. It was strictly designed to be used while it was backing up files and then shut down. I mean, it had an ac/adapter plug!

But my malware software could scan the rocketfish Chinese 350gb external drive disk though it would not mount. "Unreadable/parameter failure." So I downloaded something called virtuallab. That eased my worries because it immediately read all the files but cost $99 to allow me to save them.

Being the penny pincher that I am, I then checked out this site and downloaded two freeware applications. One was called PCinspector. and the other was Recuva. The first time I ran Recuva it only searched for deleted files and scanned my hard drive but I wasn't looking for deleted files so I figured it was the wrong thing. It also didn't find any deleted files. So I checked out pc inspector and that could not read the disk at all. something was still wrong with the parameters. I couldn't even close pc inspector as it froze trying to read the disk. I still had virtual lab to fall back on but I tried again with Recuva and discovered the options tab was checked to default as only hunt for deleted files. so I checked the box "search for undeleted files" and set it to work again. And it rebuilt the folder tree and then, since I had purchased a 500gb toshiba external drive already, I copied 190 gb of files onto that while I was working on my moped. It took about 4 hours.

 
recuva screenshot of options window







So I know everyone was real concerned and you can all sleep easy knowing I will eventually complete that stupid Arctic Wolf Quest video.
Something like Recuva should be standard on any pc. It's obvious that a logic failure on a hard drive can easily be circumvented so why doesn't Bill Gates stop trying to save the world and provide something on each windows operating system? Thank you to Recuva...

3/29/13
And a strange added feature that maybe no one will tell you about is the ability of Recuva to search within an ipod. If the ipod is enabled for hard drive use then it will show up as an external drive and Recuva can search with in it. For instance a friend gave me his ipod and it had 6 hours of podcasts that I wanted to listen to eventually but didn't want on the ipod. How could I get them off? Using Recuva I scanned the ipod for the name of the program that they were recorded. NPR, for instance, and they all showed up. I then recovered the files to a new folder onto my computer and then deleted them from the ipod and added the files to my itunes. I also did this with all the Frank Zappa files. Every time one of his songs came up during a shuffle I skipped it. But did I want to permanently delete every Zappa song? Sort of, but with Recuva I could put them onto my computer and not add them to itunes...then delete them from the iPod so I had more space to add Sam Cooke. This search feature simply didn't work with my PC even if I unhid the files. I think they are permanently marked as "read-only" so they can't be copied using Windows search function. IN fact, they can't even be found using windows search. But Recuva bypasses the standard search feature and you can pretty much search and copy any individual or group of songs from one ipod to another computer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We all sighed relief at that catasrophe averted. we all wondered what you would do for your free time.....
I am glad you recovered all your porn though.

Poncho

Oggy Bleacher said...

yeah, for a couple days I had to jerk off using my imagination. That got old real quick.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.