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Data Recovery

Attention! If files are recovered incorrectly or there are other problems make sure you are using a legal software copy.

Attention! Do not recover to the same partition which contains source data to recover. It is highly recommended to recover data to another physical device. You may recover to another partition of the same device only if you are sure that source and destination partitions don't overlap and device has no physical problems. Do not load system or run program from the partition where data to recover is located.

Before data recovery you should find and open volume. The recovery results depend on results of the volume search and which volume is opened.

To recover all found files (including lost and removed files and NTFS altstreams) you should open virtual directory [All Found + Reconstruction] in the File Panel. This is also required for auto unmarking items during group recovery.

Free Edition supports recovery of up to 4000 files from the current panel only.

Dialog Box "Recover"

Button "Size"

Calculate size of the data to recover. Global indicator of recovery process is working if the size is calculated. You should not calculate the size to avoid unnecessary device load on devices with bad sectors.

Button "List"

Save list of files selected for recovery to a file.

"Deleted" files

Recover files marked as "deleted" (see File Panel). If the option is not selected "deleted" files won't be recovered regardless the selection state.

Checkbox "Include Found"

Recover files marked as "found" (see File Panel). If the option is not checked "found" files won't be recovered regardless the selection state.

Unicode names

The option is selected if the OS supports recovering paths containing special or national symbols which does not included in limited ANSI set.

Create report (Professional Edition only)

Save recovery report to a file. List files and directories, log file I/O errors, calculate checksums CRC32, MD5, SHA1.

Checkbox "Include altstreams" (Professional Edition only)

Recover NTFS alternate data streams (Alt. stream name and file name are separated by a colon, i.e. FileName:StreamName).

Additional Issues

Recover to a FAT formatted volume

FAT volumes do not support files greater than 4GB (or sometimes 2GB). So it is not possible to recover entirely large files to FAT volumes. Large files are split during recovery (upon request). Later file parts may be joined on another disk by using system utility copy /b part1 + part2 + part3 result, for example. Pure DOS supports only FAT volumes.

File names in DOS, checkbox "Substitute names"

Without special drivers long files names are not supported under DOS. Option Substitute names allows name substitution during recovery. File LRENAME.BAT is being created in the destination folder for backward renaming. To restore original file names load OS Windows, go to the destination folder and execute the file LRENAME.BAT. An appropriate OEM code page must be selected when working in DOS in order to restore national symbols correctly. Unicode symbols outside the selected code page will be transliterated or substituted.

You may add the parameter substnamesutf8=1 to the file dmde.ini to create LRENAME.BAT in the unicode format which supports all unicode symbols regardless the selected code page. Unicode format is supported in Windows 7 and higher.

Paths longer than 259 symbols under Windows NT+

In order to recover paths which are longer than 259 symbols you should manually prepend the destination directory name with a prefix \\?\, e.g.: \\?\C:\. Such long paths may be inaccessible for standard programs such as Explorer (My Computer).

Handling of Name Duplicates

During recovery there may be name duplicates due to finding different versions of the same file, different links to the same file, or due to erroneous merging of directories.

If a file or directory with the same name is being recovered you are prompted to choose how to handle the duplicates. It is possible to rename the object manually by entering name or to choose auto renaming or skipping all subsequent objects. It is also possible to merge directories with same names.

There is a threshold number of renaming for a single object after which there will be a second request for a desired action when the threshold is exceeded. Parameters maxfilerenames and maxdirrenames of ini-file are used as threshold numbers by default.

Determining name duplicates is working on the base of destination file system. Name handling is not working if name substitution is used under DOS.