Best alternatives to recover lost directories in FAT32 external hard drive?

Posted by Sergio on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Sergio
Published on 2010-03-24T14:29:05Z Indexed on 2012/11/30 17:08 UTC
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filesystems

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data-recovery

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fat32

I have an 320 GB ADATA CH91 external hard drive. I guess it has some problems with the connector of the USB jack. The point is that in certain occasions it fails in write operations generating data losses. Right now I lost a directory with several GB's of very useful information. Since then I have not attempted to write to the disk any more.

What tool would you recommend to recover the lost data? The disk is FAT32 formatted (only one partition) and I use both Linux and Windows.
What filesystem format would you recommend to avoid future data losses? I currently only use this external hard drive in Linux so there are several available choices (FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4, reiser, etc.).

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