Recovery software, needed or not?

[AuroraProject]

I see vendors selling hard drive recovery software. Do any of these work? Are they really needed to get files off a failed hard drive? Which programs work better than the others?

Thanks.

 

[drizzt81]

I have only tried GetDataBack (www.run-time.org). I am sure that quite a few work, whether they will help in any particular case depends (largely?) upon the particular problem. A lot of the softwares that I have seen have free trails, so you can see what results you would be getting with the full version.