r/datarecovery

Submission Guidelines

First and foremost: If what you are trying to recover is important, or irreplaceable, GO TO A PRO! This includes your own data and customer data. While this sub is here for education and information, if you are doing data recovery DIY, the odds are VERY HIGH that you will lose data. DO NOT take the risk.

General Discourse and Civility

This is a forum for civil discussion and friendly advice. Refrain from insults and personal attacks. Most people here are either trying to get help, or trying to help.

Seriously people...Don't be a jerk. Jerk behavior includes by the way, snarky backup comments.

Provide Details like device names, models and file systems. Provide a SMART if applicable

Provide sufficient details for others to be able to help. If possible provide device names and models, file system data (exFAT, NTFS etc.), SMART info if relevant. People love to help, but having to ask the same info over and over becomes annoying.

No offering or requesting of illegal, hacked, cracked software

No asking for serial numbers or offering those. Results in ban.

On topic posts only.

The topic of the sub is data recovery. In other words, you can request help on the subject of data recovery. Not creating or restoring of backups, not installing an OS, not issues with any online accounts, not revival/repair of storage devices unless instrumental to data recovery

No cross posts from other communities

Too often cross posts do not contain all information, so that to answer the post the reader has to make an extra effort and visit a different community to read the actual post body. Rather than cross post, create a new post here and copy/paste the contents from the original post. If trouble shooting tips from the other community are relevant, include that information too.

This an English language sub

It's up to the poster to translate non English language posts and comments. The reader should not have to take the extra step to translate non English posts and comments.

No harmful advice or false information!

Every one can help, you do not have to be part of some elite. If you know a solution or answer to any specific problem, feel free to chip in.

However, do not advice people to perform procedures that put their data at risk! This applies to but is not limited to advising people to put drives in a freezer, to open hard drives (the actual drive, not it's enclosure), to run bad sector repair tools (like SpinRite), to run chkdsk or similar file system consistency repair tools, etc..

No LLM / AI content

Do not post LLM generated content, it tends to produce overly long questions. Translating non English to English is allowed.