Best alternatives to recover lost directories in FAT32 external hard drive?

Question

I have an 320 GB ADATA CH91 external hard drive. I guess it has some problems with the connector of the USB jack. The point is that in certain occasions it fails in write operations generating data losses. Right now I lost a directory with several GB's of very useful information. Since then I have not attempted to write to the disk any more.

• What tool would you recommend to recover the lost data? The disk is FAT32 formatted (only one partition) and I use both Linux and Windows.
• What filesystem format would you recommend to avoid future data losses? I currently only use this external hard drive in Linux so there are several available choices (FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4, reiser, etc.).

Solution 1

PhotoRec was created for exactly this problem. "Photo" in the name comes about for historical reasons, but the program now handles hundreds of file types.

PhotoRec is a free tool and it was original used to save JPEG files from a camera's SD card where the directory information was lost.

It was mentioned in episode 150 of the RunAs radio podcast. MP3 download URL (24 MB, 43 min 32 secs). I will see if I can find the exact place where it was described.

Solution 2

I really believe that if you have really important information in your disk, you should try professional help from companies that recover data. They are experienced in this field and could help you more than tutorials on the internet.

If you want to try by yourself:

• Do not write anything to your drive. Keep it intact;
• Use a file recover tool. I've used a tool named R-Studio in the past (3 years a go) and I was able to recover a lot of files;
• Change your culture about copying, backing up and saving files. External Hard Drives (and flash drives) IMHO should be a transitional place for storaging important files, not definitive ones.

Good luck!

Solution 3

PhotoRec is okay but in my experience it is geared mainly towards recovering images. I have used Recuva which is made by the same company as CCleaner.

I've also used PC Inspector File Recovery which has saved me a few times. It has the ability to fix/recover missing headers on files which can be a big issue sometimes.

Both applications are freeware utilities.

Just remember, the chances of losing files increases the more you use the drive after the initial delete/failure.

Comments

[jamuraa]

since you only use it in Linux, I assume you are looking for a Linux tool to recover the files?

[Sergio]

Not exactly, I can use Linux and Windows. Data is the priority, not OS.

[Sergio]

I'm sure the files are still there, only that the directory entry is corrupted. I'm actually looking to recover the entire directory structure, if possible. PhotoRec will just find a bunch of files