Using any kind of freeware brings its own dangers and pitfalls, but when scanning and modifying hard drive data there are some extra considerations to make. This article looks at the 3 main considerations when choosing free data recovery tools.

The first item to watch out for is the file system formats that the tool supports. Invariably, data recovery freeware is written to satisfy a need that a developer may have in recovering data from a specific file system. The popular ones are FAT and NTFS which are the most commonly used Windows formats.

Flash drives also support FAT so a recovery tool supporting FAT could work on multiple devices. Be wary of using tools that only specify other format types.

The second item to look out for is the nature by which the file recovery is made – unfortunately, many freeware applications will fail to document this. When recovering your files (in particular, the associated data clusters from the hard drive) you want the application to unobtrusively copy the files to a new location for you.

Any data recovery freeware that cuts/removes/refactors the data clusters is to be avoided as this kind of low-level modification could damage the wrong data cluster.

Lastly, each freeware tool usually has a specialization in recovering deleted/formatted files. Deleted files are traditionally the easiest to recover as the freeware can read the file allocation table (FAT) for references to deleted documents and lookup how each document is associated with a data cluster on the hard drive. The application then just displays back to you the documents found in the FAT.

Data recovery on formatted hard drives is more complex as the software may not have the FAT index to work from and would need to scan the hard drive for data clusters that can be assembled in documents. Depending on your needs (deleted/formatted data recovery) pick an application that does the right scanning process.