what's the best free and powerful undelete recovery program to recover files from drive A:

[Miguel2013]

hi I was checking my stuff and found a floppy antivirus disk from 1995 and thought I'd check its files and found there is 0. I remember back then I was using it to scan my dos, I can't remember why is empty or why I formated the disk. Can someone help me recover those files so I can run the program so i can study it? I took screenshot of the content, windows doesn't have undelete in dos anymore. I remove the protection tab to scan with chkdsk.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Puran Software - Quality First

www.puransoftware.com

As long as you can access the floppy from within Windows Explorer, Puran's utilities can scan for files to recover.

 

[68Olds]

I've use the free version of Recuva in the past. Never used it on a floppy though, so you'll need to try it & see what happens.

Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! (ccleaner.com)

 

[R-T-B]

The floppy is probably too old. They have a lifespan of around 15-20 years before they lose magnetivity in a readable sense. Most from back then are now unreadable. And probably unrecoverable.

You can still try ofcourse. +1 for recuva.

 

[Rei]

I've use the free version of Recuva in the past. Never used it on a floppy though, so you'll need to try it & see what happens.

Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! (ccleaner.com)

While rather outdated, Recuva is still a viably good recovery software.

 

[lexluthermiester]

The floppy is probably too old. They have a lifespan of around 15-20 years before they lose magnetivity in a readable sense. Most from back then are now unreadable. And probably unrecoverable.

That's not true. Like a lot of other things in life, longevity depends on quality. Not all floppy disc's were created equal. I have a Memorex set that I bought in 1996 that still work perfectly, all 10 discs, no bad sectors or read errors. The Maxell disc in the above picture is likely just fine as Maxell was a higher quality brand.

 

[freeagent]

I worked at a storage company who’s storage software was written in Pascal and our daily backups were done on floppies. They aren’t the most reliable, and can lose data after just a year or two. When staples quit selling them we had to recycle.. it wasn’t the greatest experience at times. Most of the time they were ok but they were troublesome at times. We got our parts from the computer recycler in town. Good times man. Okidata ftw

 

[R-T-B]

That's not true. Like a lot of other things in life, longevity depends on quality. Not all floppy disc's were created equal. I have a Memorex set that I bought in 1996 that still work perfectly, all 10 discs, no bad sectors or read errors. The Maxell disc in the above picture is likely just fine as Maxell was a higher quality brand.

The disks may work perfectly but the data will in general, be gone.

There are always outliers.

 

[claylomax]

Some planes still use them:

https://www.techspot.com/news/86341-boeing-747s-use-35-inch-floppy-disks-critical.html