There are all kinds of software out there that will help you attempt to recover data on damaged hard drives and floppies but how difficult is it pulling out those damaged bits? What kind of heck are you in for trying it? How painful and frustrating will it be getting data off a bad drive? Can you recover data off of DVDs reliably? Can you do it for free?

There’s really not a lot of clear information out there on data recovery and a situation came up at work where I pretty much needed my ‘Instant Miracle Worker’ hat. One of the ladies was having problems getting their training and orientation video DVD to work. Said DVD was needed working in about an hour and someone smart decided to let me know about it as I was passing by. Not that it was an IT problem, but they knew I was young enough to know what a DVD was and how to get one to work. So I put it in a machine with a DVD-ROM drive and quickly saw that it couldn’t be read. Which meant that there was a problem with the disk. Well, that’s ok you guys have another copy, right?

No.

*blink*

(pause)

And you need it when?

In an hour.

Well, let me see what I can do. (I noticed the look of fear and panic when I see it.)

So I took the fried DVD back to my computer, again tried to read it with no success. Look on the internet for free data recovery software that will read a DVD and pretty much find a bunch of useless software that you have to pay for to find out if it MIGHT work but mostly on floppies and hard drive with no mention if it’ll work on DVDs. And time is a’running out for panicked lady so I spy a program that swears it will allow you to recover data off a DVD so I go for it.

OK IsoBuster, let’s see what you can do. First it told me that it couldn’t read all of the DVD. Then it informed me it could try anyway. So I said yes, please try. Then it made a DVD image. I told it to fill in the blanks, ignore what it couldn’t find and try to see what it could save anyway. It whirred away for about 20 minutes, I clicked on the sessions it said it saw, told it to save them and… oops you have to buy the program to do that. We got the green light to save the day, purchased the $29.95 license and it made a bunch of toa video files I made sure worked via a freeware swiss army knife open source video player, VLC and burned the videos to a fresh new DVD thanks to a standalone DVD recorder. The end result was the panicked lady had her orientation and training DVD back and the only thing that was lost was the beginning of the video which was their logo spinning and looking dumb. And now they have plenty of backup copies too and are very very happy indeed.

If I had more time I’m sure I could have found a free workable direct to VOB data recovery tool (feel free to mention any here peeps) but hey, $30 is a small price to pay for saving a critical DVD and my Instant Miracle Worker status is so in tact that even if I paid the $30 MYSELF it would’ve been worth it for the looks I get right now. Unless my fly is down again, that is…