Utilities – Brian.Carnell.Com

Recuva – Excellent Deleted File Recovery Tool for Windows

So I’m a dumbass and in the process of attempting to make a 1:1 copy of every file on a full 2 TB hard drive, actually managed to delete them all before I realized what I was doing (did I mention I’m a dumbass sometime). Fortunately once I realized there were no longer any files on my drive, I did stop everything immediately so no data would overwrite the actual file data. Then I started looking for recovery options.

I finally settled on Piriform’s Recuva recovery software which had a number of things going for it.

First, it’s free. And not free as in “it’s free for the first 50 gb of files and after that you’ll need to pay us” but free as in I was able to recover every single deleted file on my hard drive without paying free. Even the Professional version is dirt cheap at just $24.95. That compares well to the $80 its nearest competitor wanted.

Second, it worked very well. When I realized my files had been deleted I did a few Google searches on reviews of data recovery software and quite a few roundups of such software rated Recuva as the best for recovering deleted files. A quick test showed why that was the case. Recuva quickly analyzed my hard drive and gave me an exhaustive list of all the deleted files on the drive, whether they were recoverable, etc.

It took me just a few minutes using some advanced filters to tell Recuva exactly what I wanted recovered, where I wanted the files to be written to, and I was on my way. Many hours later I had recovered all of the deleted files in their original directory structure, after which I made a Success Kid fist and cheered.

TSSplitter

I use a device which outputs MPEG-2 transport stream files to a FAT32 drive, which means the video gets split into 4gb files which then need to be joined together prior to editing and rendering.

TSSplitter is a Windows utility designed to join and split transport stream files, including those MPEG-2 and H264.

It is free and performs those two basic tasks flawlessly.

DeJPEG–Quickly Extract JPG Images from PDFs and Word files

DeJPEG is a utility designed to quickly extract JPG images from PDFs, Word files, Excel files and pretty much everything else.

Most reviewers of the software point out that whether it works on a given file is more or less hit or miss, but if you run into a situation where you have a large number of images you need to extract from a file, this may be worth giving a shot.

FreeFileSync

Update – November 11, 2014

Until recently I regularly used and wholeheartedly endorsed FreeFileSync. Recently, however, the developers have bundled the software with browser hijacking malware that installs itself when you attempt to install the software. As such, I no longer use or recommend FreeFileSync.

FreeFileSync is a free and open source tool for syncing directories and files. I use it primarily to mirror my main personal data drive — which clocks in at about 3 million files in 1.1 terabytes — to a local backup.

In the past, I’ve actually paid for commercial sync tools and this blows them all away. It tears through the compare and sync very quickly, and is extremely configurable if you want to go beyond simple mirroring.

I rely on this daily, and the best praise I can give it is that I just hit the Synchronize button and forget about it.