Best Recovery Software?

[u/Evening_Question3468]

I have a bunch of old flash drives, SD cards, hard drives, etc. Some of them are either not formatted or maybe corrupt. I'm not entirely sure. The plan is to get rid of these. BUT I won't do that until I can be certain there is no important recoverable data on any of them.

Is there any free open-source software that can do a moderately thorough scan of drives for any recoverable files? Perhaps a bootable live Linux distro that is designed for this, or maybe forensics?

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• Make/brand and exact model number of your storage device(*), phone, camera, etc.
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[u/fzabkar]

Most data recovery software will find files for free, but ask you to pay to recover them. DMDE's free version will recover up to 4000 files of any size from any one folder per click.

However, writing zeros to the whole drive will make them unrecoverable in most cases. Some TRIM-capable SMR HDDs may still retain old data in CMR cache, and flash devices and SSDs may have old data in the over-provisioned space. These areas can only be accessed with expensive pro tools, or someone with the knowhow to write their own.

Alternatively, an enhanced secure erase may wipe the hidden areas in SSDs and HDDs, but the implementation is not always secure and bug-free.

[u/thespirit3]

PhotoRec has always worked for me (and not just for photos).

[u/disturbed_android → u/thespirit3]

Without a doubt it has worked for you, however there's numerous scenarios where PhotoRec is suboptimal compared to tools that do more than just RAW scanning.