10/14/2013
Let's take a moment and talk about data recovery and debunk a few myths. No matter which software you use to perform any kind of recovery, these things still apply.
1. You should count on only getting ONE shot: Most software recovery programs will allow you to recover data over and over. However, if you are recovering data from a damaged hard drive (or any other storage media), it is very likely you will get only one shot at recovering data before sector damage occurs or gets worse.
2. Using software to refurbish a hard drive doesn't make the drive like new: If you have a drive that is already going bad and you use a program like SpinRite to resurface the drive, DO NOT consider it repaired. While they may work for a time, this is NOT a permanent fix. In fact, most times the drive will fail again within a very short period. Attempting to resurface the drive again will only make matters worse.
3. You can recover anything on a drive from the entire history of the drive: No, this is incorrect. You can recover most files from a drive provided that the areas where the information was stored has not been written again. You might find a very degraded portion of the information, but the more the area gets written, the more degraded it will get. If a drive has been "properly" formatted, the formatting program will write 1's and 0's in each sector. This helps mask the old information by degrading it. Think of it like a whiteboard.