Can someone recommend a good freeware to recover data?

r-studio from r-tt.com is the best but itll set you back $100, or handy recovery. There's a free crappy version of handy recovery. You can get around the 1 file per day limitation by simply deleting the handy recovery registry key each time before you run it.

But i look at data recovery like insurance. You probably spend hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars every year on car insurance, and yet unless you get into an accident you never get any value out of your money. For just $100 you can get the best data recovery program and can use it unlimited times. To me that's better than insurance. Spend the $100 for r-studio.

-gosh

Which kind of data recovery do you need:
-Deleted files
-Data lost by formatting
-Data from bad/faulty disk
-Other kind of data loss

Please specify and we may be able to help you better.

Deleted files...

You have a good point there but I have a very good backup system...these deleted file were saved on the local drive and I usually don't back that up.

Try Undelete Plus.

Thanks...That's a great tool. Adding it to my admin tool.

I have used Stellar Phoenix Windows Data recovery software to recover my lost data from formatted hard drive. Stellar Phoenix helps to recover lost data due to software malfunction, viruses, file/directory deletion or even sabotage also recovers data from inaccessible hard drive . It also provides partition recovery from FAT & NTFS file system.
You can download the demo version of the software from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
The demo shows the preview of the recovered data, if you are satisfied then get the full version to save your lost data.

If you want to make it look like you don't work there, I'd stick with a single link.