Suggestions for data recovery utility

I've seen some threads on this, but I was unable to find one from the last two years, and since software changes every month, I was hoping I could get some suggestions on data recovery utilities for the Mac.

First, the background: I plugged in my external hard drive to do a time machine backup before installing Lion, and discovered that my Mac can't read the drive. I haven't really done anything to it, but I did accidentally unplug the hard drive the other day. Anyway, I am now getting the computer cannot read the disk error with options to eject, ignore or initialize.

This is my backup drive, but I have some important personal files on there that aren't on my primary internal drive, and I'd like to recover those before I reformat. So, does anyone have suggestions for a reliable data recovery utility for recovering data on an external drive? Or, even better, a utility to repair the drive? I already tried to repair the disk with disk utility from Snow Leopard, but I know that won't always fix repairable drives.

Oh, and before anyone criticizes, I've learned my lesson. From now on, all important files will be on at least two drives plus cloud storage.

 

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For anyone doing a search on this same topic, I ended up using MiniTool for Mac. It worked well, even though the scan of my hard drive ended up taking more than a day You can restore up to 1 GB for free, but then you have to pay $50 after that. I needed to restore more than a gig, so I ponied up the cash, but it was still way cheaper than taking it to somebody to fix.