5 Best External Hard Drive Recovery Software: Recover Data from External Hard Drive
This page covers everything you need to know about external hard drive recovery, covering topics such as learning what you can recover, understanding the recovery process, and identifying the best recovery software and tools. You'll also learn how to prevent data loss in the future, including tips on backing up your data regularly and using the right storage devices. Additionally, you'll find information on how to recover data from a damaged or corrupted external hard drive, including what to do if your drive is no longer recognized by your computer.
- 1. What is external hard drive recovery?
- 2. When do you need to perform external hard drive recovery?
- 3. What is the best recovery software for external hard drive?
- 4. How to recover data from external hard drive?
- 5. How to protect data on external hard drive?
If you are having one of the listed problems on your mind, keep reading and you'll get a satisfying answer here.
Overview of External Hard Drive Recovery
You'll learn about external hard drive recovery, including what it is and when it's necessary. This process involves recovering data from an external hard drive that has been damaged, corrupted, or otherwise compromised. It's essential to understand when to perform external hard drive recovery to prevent data loss and ensure the recovery process is successful.
External hard drives offer great convenience, allowing us to carry large amounts of data anywhere and easily share files between storage media. However, a significant portion of data loss occurs on these devices, making external hard drive recovery a necessary step in many cases.
What is external hard drive recovery?
External hard drive recovery involves recovering deleted, lost data from an external hard drive, even if it's corrupted or accidentally formatted. Unlike internal drives, lost files on an external hard drive don't get sent to the Recycle Bin, making it necessary to use a reliable hard drive data recovery software to retrieve the data.
When do you need to perform external hard drive recovery?
External hard drives can experience data loss due to various reasons beyond accidental deletion and formatting, such as physical damage, power surge, or software corruption, necessitating the need for external hard drive recovery.
- Due to a virus attack, OS crash, or OS reinstallation, the data on the external hard drive has been lost.
- The external hard drive has a RAW file system and is therefore inaccessible.
- If an external hard drive is detected in Windows but not showing any data, it's possible that the drive is not properly initialized, the file system is corrupted, or there's an issue with the drive's connection. To resolve the issue, try reformatting the drive, checking the drive's connection, or using a data recovery software to scan the drive for recoverable data.
- The USB hard drive is not recognized
ATTENTION: External hard drive recovery is possible as long as the data isn't overwritten by new content, so stop using the disk immediately after data loss and perform recovery as soon as possible.
Luckily, you can perform external hard drive recovery with professional and reliable data recovery software. To help you out, we'll include 5 best external hard drive recovery software in the next part.
Top 5 Best External Hard Drive Recovery Software Recommend (2022)
The process of recovering data from an external hard drive can be made easy by using the right data recovery tool. According to user reviews, geek websites' tests, and our experience, the top 5 hard drive data recovery software that can help you recover data from an external hard drive with ease are highly recommended.
5 Best External Hard Drive Recovery Software in 2022:
Also Read: 15 Best Hard Drive Recovery Software
Whether you're using Windows 10/8 or older Windows XP, you can download one of the recommended software to help recover deleted, formatted, or lost data from your external hard drive or inaccessible drive.
#1. Trustworthy External Hard Drive Recovery Software - Deep Data Recovery
Deep Data Recovery is a software that can help recover data from an external hard drive, serving as an external hard drive recovery software. It is widely used to recover data from external disks.
- Recover deleted, formatted, and lost data from external hard drive
- To recover data from an external hard drive after a virus attack, OS crash, OS reinstallation, or file system becoming RAW, follow these steps:
- Recover all existing file types including photos, videos, audio files, emails, documents, and more.
- The external hard drives supported by this product include Buffalo, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, Lacie, Silicon, ADATA, and many more.
- Videos like MP4, MOV, and images like JPG, JPEG, GIF, etc. can be repaired using video and image repair tools.
Best For: All levels of Windows and Mac users
Ease of Use: Beginners Best Choice, intuitive UI design, 3-step recovery
Qiling data recovery software can be used to recover files from various storage devices, including computer hard drives, USB flash drives, memory cards, and digital cameras, in addition to external hard drives.
If you lost external hard drive data on a Mac computer, you can download the Mac version of the software for assistance.
How to Perform External Hard Drive Recovery with Qiling Data Recovery Software
After downloading and installing Deep Data Recovery on your computer, you're only a few steps away from recovering your data from the external hard drive.
Step 1. Select file types and click "Next" to start
- Download and install Qiling Data Recovery on your PC or laptop.
- Connect the external hard drive to your computer.
- Launch Deep Data Recovery. Select file types and click "Next" to start.
Step 2. Choose and scan the external hard drive
- To recover data from an external drive, select the drive from the External drives list, and then click on "Scan for lost data".
Step 3. Check the scan results
- Qiling data recovery software will immediately scan the selected drive for all data, including deleted, corrupted, and existing data.
- You can use the Filter feature to quickly locate files of a specific type, such as Pictures, Word documents, Excel files, PDFs, videos, or emails.
Step 4. Preview and recover data
- Double-clicking a file from the scanned results to preview.
- Choose the files you want and click "Recover".
- To avoid overwriting the original files, save the recovered files to a different drive, such as an external hard drive or a USB drive, instead of saving them back to the original drive where the data loss occurred. This ensures that the recovered files are safely stored and can be accessed later.
#2. Ontrack EasyRecovery
Ontrack is a data recovery service provider that originally offered hard disk repair and data recovery services for global users. However, the company has since expanded its offerings to include data recovery software, allowing users to attempt DIY data recovery at home.
Ontrack EasyRecovery is a hard disk recovery software that supports restoring lost files on both Windows and Mac computers, similar to Deep Data Recovery. It allows users to recover lost data, making it a useful tool for those who have lost important files due to various reasons.
- Recover files from corrupted, deleted, or formatted drives
- Data recovery software can recover data from various storage devices, including internal and external hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), USB drives, memory cards, and more. This software can help retrieve lost or deleted files, even if the storage device is damaged or corrupted.
- Repair damaged and corrupted photos and videos with the premium and higher versions of the software, restoring them to their original quality and format.
Best for: Windows and Mac users
Ease of Use: 3-step recovery
#3. Recover My Files
Recovery My Files, a classic data recovery software, has been around for a while and is still used by experienced users. It was produced by GetData, a company that has been in the data recovery business for some time.
You can recover data and files from various scenarios and devices using this software, including restoring files from a damaged or corrupted hard drive, recovering deleted files from a memory card, retrieving data from a crashed computer, and more.
- Data recovery services can help you retrieve lost files from various storage devices, including hard drives, external hard drives, camera cards, USB drives, and even old Zip drives. Whether you've experienced a physical failure, software corruption, or accidental deletion, our experts can assist you in recovering your important files and memories.
- Recover files after emptied recycle bin
- Recover files after formatting, disk crash, partitioniong error, etc.
- Recover documents, photos, video, music, etc.
Best For: Windows users only
Ease of Use: Not for beginners, complex interface
#4. GetDataBack
GetDataBack, like Recover My Files, is a classic data recovery software that allows users to perform DIY data recovery. It is produced by Runtime Software and comes in versions for both 64bit and 32bit Windows OS.
This hard disk recovery software can recover lost data from various file systems, including NTFS, FAT, HFS, and more. It supports recovery of files with various extensions, such as documents, images, videos, and audio files. The software can also recover data from corrupted or damaged hard drives, including those with physical damage or logical errors.
- The software supports data recovery from various file systems, including NTFS, FAT, exFAT, EXT, HFS+, and APFS, allowing users to recover data from a wide range of devices.
- Data recovery software can be used to recover data lost due to formatting, partitioning, virus attacks, power or software failures. This software can scan the affected device, locate the lost data, and recover it, often with a high success rate.
Best for: Windows, Mac, and Linux users
Ease of Use: 4+ steps of data recovery, Not for beginners
#5. Recuva
Piriform Recuva remains a powerful data recovery software, despite being old, and is still widely used due to its excellent performance in file recovery.
With a low price, Recuva exceeds its competitors even its interface is old and sort of complex for beginners, offering a wide range of features that make it stand out in the external hard disk recovery software market.
- You can recover files from various devices and locations, including your computer, the recycle bin, digital camera cards, MP3 players, and more.
- Recover pictures, music, documents, videos, etc.
- Recover from external storage devices like external hard drive, USB sticks, etc.
- Securely delete files, erase files
Best for: Windows users only
Ease of Use: Not for beginners
After learning about the basic features of the top 5 external hard drive recovery software, you can now choose one and use it to recover your lost files from an external hard drive, USB, or SD card.
In addition to recommending the best hard disk recovery software, we've also gathered some valuable tips for safeguarding your data on external hard drives. These tips are designed to help you protect your files and prevent data loss, so be sure to follow them and take care of your own files right now.
How to Protect Data on External Hard Drives
To minimize the risk of losing files from an external hard drive, it's better to both reduce the chance of data loss and have a data recovery tool to rescue data once it's lost, without relying on backups. Regularly backing up the external hard drive is a good habit to have.
Good habits to protect an external hard drive:
- 1. Keep your external hard drive away from fire, water, high temperature, and physical impact to prevent data loss and damage.
- 2. To help prolong the life of your external hard drive, disconnect it from your computer when it's not in use. This will prevent it from being constantly powered on and off, which can cause wear and tear on the drive's internal components.
- 3. Don't edit files directly on the external hard drive
- 4. Eject the device before disconnecting it
- 5. Put your external hard drive in a disk enclosure
Ways to back up an external hard drive:
- 1. Manually copy and paste the important files from your external hard drive to somewhere else, such as an internal hard drive, a cloud storage service, or another external hard drive, to ensure their safety and accessibility in case the original drive fails or is damaged.
- 2. To ensure your external hard drive files are safely backed up, use a reliable backup software to automate the process. This way, you can set it to run at regular intervals, such as daily or weekly, to keep your files up to date.
- 3. To ensure your external hard drive's data is backed up and easily accessible, you can sync it with cloud storage. This process involves uploading your external drive's contents to a cloud storage service, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
Growing good habits, such as regularly backing up your data, can help minimize the chance of accidental data loss on your drive. This is especially important in case you lose files on your storage medium, as backing up your disk can help you avoid complete data loss.
The Bottom Line
External hard drive data recovery is straightforward with the right assistance from data recovery software. Most data recovery tools support external hard drive recovery, but the quality can vary. To recover data from your external hard disk, choose a trusted software and apply it as soon as possible.
Qiling hard disk recovery software stands out among most data recovery software due to its practicality and reliability, thanks to its powerful data recovery capacity and excellent tech support. If you encounter issues with Deep Data Recovery, you can reach out to the support team via email at support@idiskhome.com for assistance.
As a responsible data recovery software provider, we not only help with data recovery but also recommend backing up your vital data regularly. Having a regular backup of your files is the best way to ensure your data's safety.
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