[RNLD] data recovery options

[Reuben Brown]

Dear RNLD subscribers,

You've probably heard this story before, but here comes another cautionary
tale about the virtues of constant data back up while in the field, and the
pitfalls of external drives which can fail at any moment it seems, no
matter how big or expensive or new they are.

I have potentially lost about 2 months of PhD fieldwork recordings that I
had not got around to backing up, stored on an external USB hard drive
which has failed or become corrupted (Seagate GoFlex Free Agent, less than
6 months old). I took the drive to the local computer shop in Darwin and
they tried to recover the data using some of their software programs but
were unsuccessful. Now I am looking at sending the drive to data recovery
specialists in Sydney or Melbourne and I wondered if anyone has any
recommendations as to whom I might sent it to?

Also, has anyone tried recovering data on their own before using programs
like TestDisk <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk> or
PhotoRec<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec>?
An earlier thread <http://www.rnld.org/recovering_files> suggested a
program called 'Back2Life' but it doesn't appear to support EXFAT formatted
drives. I am looking at recovering MTS, wav, mp3, mp4, and mov files which
were all stored on the drive. I am using a Mac OSX 10.6.8, which I
originally used to format the drive to EXFAT so that it could be used for
both Mac and PC. One day it was working and the next day I plugged it in on
the same machine to find that 'the disk you inserted was not readable by
this computer'. I have tried different USB cables and different machines,
but no luck reading the partition.

Any considerations or suggestions much appreciated.

Regards,

Reuben.
-- 
Reuben Brown

PhD Candidate
The University of Sydney
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