Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue PC3

The external hard drive of a friend of mine fell off a shelf and the connecting cable broke off the connecting plug on the drive. We tried mounting the drive in a new case, buying an identical model of the drive and swapping the drive electronics. But, even though the Windows 8 (and also 7) operating system said the drive was operating normally, it would not mount onto the PC as a regular drive, such as Drive F:. We concluded that we needed data rescue services.

I contacted Gibson  Research and asked by email whether their product Spin Rite would be able to recover the data. They said no, but in a lengthy, helpful email they sent me the contact information for a number of companies and software applications that do what we needed. I looked at several data rescue applications, free and for sale, but most of the free ones had a limited 1 GB of data recovery. For a 1 TB, that's not enough. So, I researched the paid applications, using reviews from Top Ten and PC Magazine Editor's choice and came up with Data Rescue PC3.

Even though this is a $100 program, it's saving grace is that you can run it in demo mode to find out whether or not it will save your bacon.  We did and it could. So we purchased it and it worked.

If you need this program, be sure to turn off the sleep mode of your computer before you start. Data recovery for a terabyte requires 8 to 20 hours, and if your PC goes to sleep in 30 minutes, data recovery will stop.

My friend is very happy to get his 125,000 files in 7,500 folders back, and considers the cost well worth it. The user interface is fairly straightforward, making the software easy to use.

And a gold star goes to technical support. I called them three times to ask a question before I had purchased the product. Help came quickly  (on the phone waiting for less than a minute each time) and got the answers I needed. I emailed support once after registering and got an unhelpful answer, but they did respond promptly.

In a word, this is an effective product with great technical support. You can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars rescuing your "lost" data with this program. It's non invasive, too, meaning that it doesn't change any data on the drive you want to rescue.