Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt photos?

[AJ847.63e]

Hi All,

My WD external drive I used to use for my backups recently decided to go belly up on me so I've been playing around with different bits of software to try see if I can recover it and just wanted to get some advise on which programs you guys have the most success with.

Yes I've cloned the drive and no I'm not paying a grand to take it to a professional. If I can get some stuff back great, which I have, but there's still quite a lot I haven't. It's not worth taking to a professional though it's only my programming courses and vacation stuff so it's a nice to have but not a burn a hole in my wallet to have.

I first tried EaseUS to try scan and recover the drive. That took about 4 hours and recovered only 9GB of data. I went to scan the drive several times after that and it just completes very quickly and says there's nothing left to recover.

I then did some googling and found a lot of people recommend disk drill so I tried that and 4 days later it's found a further 10GB of stuff and says it still has 809 hours to go.

While disk drill is running in the background, I did some googling to find which software's supposed to be the best for recovering corrupted photos and have tried 2 of them so far. Wondershare recover it which removed the corruption but turns a 4K image into a 128x96 image which is completely useless. I also tried kernel photo repair which did not remove the corruption.

Which other software should I try? Thanks for the assistance!

[jiroy]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

I use Active File Recovery data manager , and I found out it's the best in results and eficiency , comparing to others . It works on all systems from XP to W10 without any errors . But the problem is , an already corrupted image is already finished .
There are no other ways other than using Photoshop and similar to rescue the half and partially cut/corrupted images , by resizing , trimminig , etc .. You can also use the full free Gimp (GNU licence) if you don't want to spend too much money .

https://www.file-recovery.com/recovery.html

https://www.gimp.org/

[AJ847.63e]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Thanks I thought as much. Got sucked in to all the click farm articles of wondershare and all the other programs so I thought it would be possible but after trying over 20 different programs now it seems it's sadly not.
Frustrating how much of a scam data recovery is. I can't believe how much software there is out there that will scan the drive, "find" the files than say ok give us money now without actually showing that it is going to actually work.

[jiroy]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Thanks I thought as much. Got sucked in to all the click farm articles of wondershare and all the other programs so I thought it would be possible but after trying over 20 different programs now it seems it's sadly not.
Frustrating how much of a scam data recovery is. I can't believe how much software there is out there that will scan the drive, "find" the files than say ok give us money now without actually showing that it is going to actually work.

Always search for GNU Licence softwares first , mostly free or sometimes with little restrictions .. I re-edited my previous posts and added the links . Good luck

[diif]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

I use photorec. If it was a drive used for backups, can't you use the original files on the other drive ?
It's not a backup if its the only source of the files

[Hondaman]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Is the external drive an SSD or a spinning drive?

I have used GetDataBack from Runtime Software several times. It works well. Recently I found my serial number from an e-mail they sent me in 2010. Yes, they said I am still eligible for a free upgrade to the latest version!

(I'll have to download, e-mail them and finalize this soon before I forget.)

[eccerr0r]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

If it was a drive used for backups, can't you use the original files on the other drive ?
It's not a backup if its the only source of the files

Word.
pisses me off when people call a copy of some piece of data a "backup" when it's not actually a duplicate copy.
They may call it a cold store 'archive' but clearly not 'backup' if there's no original copy somewhere.

Data recovery is expensive because it's technical, requires full attention to do it for the most part, and requires expensive tools. You avoid doing this by... making true backups.

[AJ847.63e]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

It's a 2.5" external HDD from Western digital. Not sure what version/model, It's quite old so all the labels have faded on it.

Thanks I'll check the links out. Found a new program called Bitrecover a friend of mine recommended. Not making much progress with it though been going for 8 hours now and it's still repairing the single photo I gave it to see if it works.

Yes this was my backup drive the originals are on the devices they were taken on, so either a iphone which I'm still using so icloud will be easy to access or a note 10 + which would have them in google cloud or if I can find the memory card I used with it. This is the problem with constantly switching phones I've always been too lazy to consolidate everything into one location so this was the drive that had most of my stuff on it. I'll have to login to my google drive and icloud to recover the originals. As for my programs probably won't be able to get them back, the originals are long gone sold that laptop a long time ago.

[diif]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

It's going to take significantly less time than 800 hours to pull the original files off your clouds/old devices and they won't be corrupt.

[AJ847.63e]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Well that's fun. 4 days in to running disk drill and windows decides to do a update on me and blue screens on the reboot. Sigh, I grow closer and closer to moving to the dark side as each day passes. I'll restart with active file recovery and see if that's any faster this time. And hope the blue screen hasn't made the drive worse!

[deepblue32]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

I can't recommend PhotoRec enough for this purpose, I've used it a couple times and it does the job; it works a little too well if you use it on someone else PC though. Assuming the hard drive is still reading and writing properly and it's just the partition scheme that's messed up, it should function flawlessly

[Bushcat]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

I've use the free Recuva successfully: https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva. Photorec (mentioned above) also does the job: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download. Neither are as fast as copying stuff from the backup.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Yes I've cloned the drive

exactly what software did u use to clone the bad drive? u have to use the right program to extract as much good data as quickly as possible then go over the bad sectors to re-read them until u get lucky and it momentarily becomes readable and u manage to get the data back. my longest was 3-5 days stuck over the same bad unreadable sectors until i just gave up. whatever data was on those sectors is hosed and is long gone if they cant be read after trying for 3-5 days!! depends on how much time and energy u are willing to invest in it and the value of the data. for some, time is money, so spending weeks trying is not an option.

on the other hand, there are also others willing to try more adventurous methods for data recovery like coating the drive with vaseline and putting the drive in the freezer to freeze it. at sub zero temperatures, bad sectors *might* become readable again. then u must quickly hot plug the drive to the os, so it helps if u have a motherboard with sata ahci functions, then quickly run the command to re-read the bad sectors on the drive before the drive warms up and the bad sectors become unreadable again.

Well that's fun. 4 days in to running disk drill and windows decides to do a update on me and blue screens on the reboot.

thats why i dont use windows for data recovery. a linux based rescue environment is much better in this regard. even if u are forced to use windows because a specific data recovery software u use is windows only, u must use a live cd windows environment (an os that boots off a cd) to do the rescue function. plenty of windows live cds around. just look around on the wayback machine aka internet archive or google.

also, are u running the recovery software on the cloned/rescue drive or bad drive? u dont run the software for days on the cloned drive because the data wont "get better" since there isnt anything wrong with the cloned drive. it depends on what u did to extract the data from the bad drive. just run once on the rescue drive and be done. this is why u must use the correct software, procedure and method. otherwise, u are just wasting your time without getting any or much data back at all.

[AJ847.63e]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

Sorry for the late response, been having a hell of a time to get ANY software to detect the clone ever since freaking windows BSOD on me. Finally got disk drill to find the clone of the drive again and it is currently creating a backup for me before it goes offline again, and I have the same issue.

I used Aoemi backupper to clone the drive. Is it worth looking at getting a hardware cloner like the satartech SDOCK2U313R? I've got a few old systems that I probably should take a snapshot of so this would certainly come in handy.

I've been running disk drill on the clone, so the drive that AOMEI created for me as after I cloned the drive I tried booting off a lazersoft data recovery environment USB stick a friend of mine told me to use and ran checkdisk on the original faulty drive which of course deleted all the corrupted folders and only left the ok intact content so if I run disk drill on that it won't find anything. I haven't bothered to recover the bad sectors as I seriously doubt it will work, I've just been trying to recover the corrupted folders which disk drill has been successful at but is slow as a slug. Recovered 12GB which I decided to export to a external drive which lucky I did because just after that finished windows blue screened on me. Now it's running a backup so I don't end up in the same situation with the drive undetectable. Straight after the blue screen windows refused to see the drive, Disk management would lock up, and running disk drill would find it than loose it and say "drive name" is offline please reconnect it. Multiple restarts and it finally stopped saying that and that's why I decided to this time listen to it and do a backup in disk drill. Though it doesn't look like it's going to finish, been going for a day now and it's only done 357MB cloned 4415 hours to go. Leave it going over the weekend and see how it goes. If it doesn't finish I'll cancel the backup and just let it scan through the corrupted folders again.

[kaka9999]

Re: Which software do you guys have the best of luck with for recovering corrupt phot

I tried about 10 programs to recover files and none of them could recover a small file from 1 or 2 months ago, therefore they are all very bad for me...