Testimonial - Data recovery software

[ZenTree]

Whilst messing about with Kali whilst tired I, incredibly embarrassingly, managed to corrupt the major data partition on my personal computer.

Testdisk and Easus both spent a couple of hours scanning for partitions and came back with nothing useful. File recovery was possible but the folder structure was completely borked so it would just be one large list of files.

On a wing and a prayer I googled for other recommendations and came across DMDE, which is one i'd never even heard of. Ran it, LIGHTNING quick initial scan and it claimed to have been able to see my missing partition. Check the structure and actually looked legit. Applied, rebooted and it's all there. Everything.

The important stuff was (mainly) backed up online so it was more the hassle of finding out what I had and hadn't got and then recovering it but I was very impressed with how quickly it found everything considering the usually solid testdisk was completely thrown. I haven't check the ToS for commercial use yet but definitely worth a look if you're in trouble.

 

[Larry Sabo]

+1 for DMDE. It's terrific!

 

[labtech]

+1 DMDE is good for stuff like that.

 

[lcoughey]

+1 DMDE, but never on the original drive...at least not before first getting a full sector-by-sector copy.

 

[mraikes]

....snipped...... I haven't check the ToS for commercial use yet but definitely worth a look if you're in trouble.

For the $95 professional version:

1.1. COMMERCIAL USE AND PAID SERVICES ARE ALLOWED

You may use the SOFTWARE functionality for both non-commercial and
commercial purposes and provide data recovery services.

More important deets here: https://dmde.com/editions.html

If it works that well, it seems very reasonably priced for commercial use.

 

[ZenTree]

+1 DMDE, but never on the original drive...at least not before first getting a full sector-by-sector copy.

You know the first thing I thought when I posted this was that you would post that exact reply! Completely agree on the copy, if this was a customer's drive we'd clone before any sort of work was done.

Speaking of cloning, for those who have +1'd DMDE, how does it fair with failing drives? Can it adjust like dd or does it just die?

And yes @lcoughey I would recommend going to a professional data recovery service if the customer's data is that important to them and drive looked to be physically failing

 

[ZenTree]

For the $95 professional version:

1.1. COMMERCIAL USE AND PAID SERVICES ARE ALLOWED

You may use the SOFTWARE functionality for both non-commercial and
commercial purposes and provide data recovery services.

More important deets here: https://dmde.com/editions.html

If it works that well, it seems very reasonably priced for commercial use.

Yes I'm very surprised it's that cheap! Definitely worth that sort of money.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Speaking of cloning, for those who have +1'd DMDE, how does it fair with failing drives? Can it adjust like dd or does it just die?

I only use it on clones of failing drives and it works great on them. If a drive is failing, you shouldn't be using software (other than ddrescue or HDDSuperClone) on them.

 

[ZenTree]

I only use it on clones of failing drives and it works great on them. If a drive is failing, you shouldn't be using software (other than ddrescue or HDDSuperClone) on them.

To clarify, I meant in terms of making a clone of a failing drive with it. I'm assuming from your answer it doesn't cope that well? compared to ddrescue/hddsuperclone

 

[Larry Sabo]

@ZenTree: I've never used it to clone drives; I use a hardware imager. I don't know how well it copes with time-outs, i.e., whether it can do soft/hard resets. It certainly can't do power resets, which are often needed on unstable drives. Its main strength is recovery from file system corruption. I find it handy for recovering files from NAS drives that use EXT3/4.

 

[ZenTree]

Thanks for the feedback Larry

 

[lcoughey]

You know the first thing I thought when I posted this was that you would post that exact reply! Completely agree on the copy, if this was a customer's drive we'd clone before any sort of work was done.

It wasn't directed at you...kind of figured you didn't care about the risk of your own data, but thought it was worth mentioning for current and future lurkers.

It should be noted that if you want to have it installed to run on multiple systems, it is expected to have a license for each system. So, the low price seems pretty good until you have a data recovery lab with 10 file system recovery systems. Of course, unlikely an issue for most of the members here.

 

[labtech]

The main purpose of the DMDE software, just like many other file system applications, is to work with the file system, including analysis, potential repairs, listing files, extracting them, etc. The clone function in DMDE, just like all other software out there, is just an add on for creating clones (supposedly for healthy drives basically). It is not built with advanced functionality to overcome faulty/degraded drives condition. No software does this really well. The software may do a decent job ONLY if the drive is just barely degraded. Anything more is basically death to a drive (and the customer's data). Hardware imagers do a great job as they are designed to optimize imaging parameters with the use of ATA commands. As Larry said, yes, ddrescue and superhddclone are a bit better as their design optimizes best within their own limitations.

 

[Yusuke92]

Great Post I'm Learning Tons of stuff looking forward to learn more about data recovery hopefully with very little trial and error Thanks for the post guys

 

[lcoughey]

Great Post I'm Learning Tons of stuff looking forward to learn more about data recovery hopefully with very little trial and error Thanks for the post guys

If you want to learn about data recovery, this is likely not the forum in which to learn. There are a handful of us who run data recovery labs as a primary business, but the majority of members here just outsource their data recovery work.

I just added a new resource, listing and linking to various data recovery focused forums. It isn't yet approved, but I suspect it will be before too long.

 

[Yusuke92]

Thank you very much I am looking forward to reading through that new resource once it has been approved