You can try the titles at https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/lost-and-found-or-the-storage-forum-sticky-354911/ and Recuva is top notch at this.
Beyond that you should try drivesavers.com but if files have overwritten parts, nothing today recovers those.
-> Sorry if I shortchange you here. It's a shame when it happens and just like you hear, backups are not optional on today's computers and for the foreseeable future as well.
ok, so I'm using a free software recovery program Recuva. I've tried some other free ones but they were a little cumbersome to use.
Backstory: I have like 250 GB worth of home videos that somehow disappeared off of an old HDD. The previous setup I was using was a 250GB for the OS and programs and a separate 500GB drive for my data files.
One sunny Sunday afternoon my garbage disposal quit working and dear 'ole dad decided to mess with the breaker box and ended up turning all the power off at the box all of a sudden and blew my power supply and motherboard up. haha, so i was left without my PC for some time until i just recently acquired a new one. I hooked my old data drives to the new one to transfer over , but all my stuff was Gone! It should have been accessible as before since it didn't have an OS on it. it was simply a storage drive.
I don't recall ever deleting it or cutting and pasting it. It was just nowhere to be found on the drive.
This is why I'm attempting to recover it since i Know it was on there at one time. I don't believe the sudden power outage would delete any of the data, maybe corrupt the OS or something but they were on a separate drive so it shouldn't have been affected.
So, my issue with the free recovery software is that it is only recovering stuff from a 2012-2013 time frame, but I had stuff from as far back as 2005 on the drive. Are the free ones not as thorough as a paid app? Would a paid program find what I need it to? Like I said, there is A LOT of video I am looking to recover but what I am looking for hasn't showed up in any of the free software scans

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