PC Tech Thread

Thanks, giving it a go, appears to have found most of the folders with contents! Will have to look.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to like saving the files onto a different network drive file path, so need to buy a USB hard drive with sufficient storage to do it.

Do you know whether it saves the fragments before recombining?

Huge thanks for this recommendation, the software worked an absolute treat.

It recovered way more than was actually saved on the drive, including thumbnails, small res jpgs and previously deleted files too. Recovering about 900GB of data, then putting it onto the new NAS drive and then saving a copy onto a backup USB drive too a couple of days though...

Zero Assumption Recovery has been at the top of my list for many years.

Good to know, I had a run in with a data recovery company (Fields Data Recovery) last year that I wish I'd researched a bit better in advance. Let's just say I wish I'd seen this site: https://data-recovery-blog.co.uk/ before using them, but it was a recommendation from a friend that I trusted (who said they did good things for them at a fair price).

I was strung along by a few "we're almost there" lines whilst I willingly and knowingly gave them more info as to how important the files might be to me. In the end they quoted a figure I wasn't willing to pay (£645+VAT), and so I rejected that and asked for the HDD back. All in all I only ever paid ~£7 to post the drive to them in the first place, they posted it back to me for free. If they had quoted ~£200 and just did it without the "almost there!" stuff I would have paid.

It was giving proper hardware errors before sending it (which is why I didn't want to make it worse by trying to do the recovery myself) and was not in any better shape by the time it came back.

In the end I found an image of all the files I was looking for on another HDD, so I didn't have to worry about this one.