Too Late for Backup...
"Great idea", I hear you say. "Might have been a bit more useful to me yesterday, before I accidentally deleted my thesis..."
BackupMyPocket is a "prevention" application. It attempts to prevent you from losing important data on your storage device. So, what do you do when you need a "cure"? You may have deleted something, accidentally formatted your USB drive or it's just become corrupt out of the blue... Often in this situation, despite the sick, sinking feeling, all is not lost.
Stop. Take a Break, Calm Down.
Before you panic any more than you probably already have, take some consolation from the fact that usually, data is recoverable. This is why Governments and organisations with sensitive data go to painstaking lengths to destroy hard drives when they want to get rid of them. People often panic when they lose data and frantically click, copy, and try anything that comes to mind to get it back. Doing this reduces the likelihood that you'll be able to get the data back.
How to Get Your Data Back
I won't write yet another tutorial here on how to recover data, there are plenty out there already. Here are some useful links however to help you get your data back.
Of course, once you have got your data back, you might want to consider using BackupMyPocket to make life easier in the future ;-)
Disclaimer: If you're serious about recovering your data, you should not attempt to do it yourself unless you know how to minimise reading by create a disk image using a program like dd or dd_rescue, and how to perform recovery from the resulting image. Disk drives should be chilled in a static-free, airtight container prior recovery to contract the bearings. Alternatively, seek the services of a data recovery professional. Try these tips at your own risk.How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP using CHKDSK
Chkdsk - "Chkdsk (Chkdsk.exe) is a command-line tool that checks volumes for problems. The tool then tries to repair any that it finds."
Data Recovery for Mac
List of Data Recovery Tools - Mac has some built in tools for disk repair, but there are a number of third party options too.
Recuva
http://www.recuva.com/ - Recuva is an easy to use freeware file recovery utility for Windows, made by Piriform. If you're a beginner using Windows, this may be all you need.
Linux Options
- If you are comfortable using Linux, there are a plethora of recovery tools available. Here are a few:
Ddrescue - "a raw disk imaging tool that 'copies data from one file or block device to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.'" This is a wise thing to do prior to commencing recovery. You create an image of the disk (requiring just one read) then recover data from the disk image.
PhotoRec - "data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives". This is generally my tool of choice if Recuva doesn't work. It's a good mix of thorough recovery and simplicity.
Autopsy - Now we're getting serious - "The Autopsy Forensic Browser is a graphical interface to the command line digital investigation tools in The Sleuth Kit"
FCCU GNU/Linux Forensic Boot CD -This is probably the beez kneez of free digital forensics software. It is an entire operating system designed for digital forensics tasks, made by the Belgian Federal Computer Crime Unit and generously distributed to the public for free! Definitely not for beginners, but a very powerful set of tools.
