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Holy time travel, Batman! We haven't seen an interface this retro since Win 3.1. This program's GUI looks like it was designed during kindergarten art class. If we were rolling with an old school 16-color EGA monitor, Undelete PLUS would look exactly the same. You get the point.
But what you don't get are very many options, and the lack of a deep scan limits the program's usefulness. You can use a filter to narrow searches down by name, date, or size, but that's it. On the same partition we used throughout all testing, Undelete PLUS unearthed 102 files.
There's just not enough here to recommend using Undelete PLUS.
Verdict: 5
Free, http://undelete-plus.com/
Avira makes one of the best free antivirus programs around, scoring an 8 verdict in our recent AV roundup, so we had high hopes the company would be equally successful with its file recovery app. But instead of again leading the freebie pack, Avira's UnErase Personal offers the least expansive program of the bunch (to be fair, Avira has discontinued this program).
Don't bother looking for any options, because there aren't any. You select a partition to scan and that's it. You can't limit searches to specific files, there's no deep scan option, and you won't find a preview pane. Instead, UnErase Personal takes a quick peek at your drive, including removable media, and finds about the same amount of files as every other program without the aid of an extended scan. But unlike the rest, Avira doesn't tell you where the files were located, nor does it offer a tree view or any other amenities.
With nothing but the bare essentials, we're left wondering why UnErase Personal even requires an installation routine. Save yourself the trouble and look elsewhere.
Verdict: 3
Free, http://www.free-av.com/en/products/10/avira_unerase_personal.html
Comments are closed on this article
Raxonon
August 02, 2010 at 1:53am
I have used the Stellar phoenix data recovery software for windows . Its cool and very userfriendly . Although its not needed but alongwth the software we get user guide for step by step operation. I found it cent percent accurate with recovery results.
Marcus_Soperus
January 20, 2009 at 2:49pm
I've had great success with Ontrack Easy Data Recovery Professional (about $200, so it was too expensive for this roundup), but recently, I had to recover data from a corrupt laptop SATA drive that totally baffled Ontrack. After doing some research, I found that a number of users were recommending using the Knoppix Linux distro for NTFS recovery.
I created a Knoppix boot CD, and was able to access the drive's file system after Ontrack came up empty-handed. While Knoppix can read NTFS files, it requires the captive-NTFS option to write to a drive using the NTFS file system. Rather than mess around with that, I reformatted an external USB drive as a FAT32 device and used it to save the data. The result: a very happy client.
Learn more about using Knoppix for data recovery from these websites: http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/; http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3214
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It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
jayson001
January 20, 2009 at 10:51am
I just bought Zero Assumption Recovery to pull some files off an IDE hard drive that was too corrupt to access. It was $50 for the single user licesnse and I think worth it to get my old data back. Drive I was trying to access was an NTFS drive, and I was running ZAR under XP 32-bit. These reviews say two things to me. You can't get top quality recovery software for free or cheaply and 64 bit OSes are still not quite ready for prime time.
Fuetasoeq
January 20, 2009 at 7:41am
I Use Runtime Software's GetbackData. I have 3 versions. Fat32, NTFS and I also got Raid Recovery which worked well and netted me 20 times more than what all 3 programs cost me!
I can format a drive, install windows on it, format it again and recover the data that was on it before I formatted it the first time!
Bobby Melendez
politik
January 20, 2009 at 5:04am
Easy Recovery Pro from Ontrack has worked for me very well. I use it in a commercial setting and have done so for years. Even on hard drives that are near death, I've had a lot of sucess in getting data off. Customers who accidently used the System restore disc on their computer and not realizing that they erased everything they had, I've been able to get back a lot of their data.
Yusonice
January 20, 2009 at 1:53am
Recuva doesnt seem to work after i reformat HDD and try to recover the files.
Is there a program that can recover files from a reformatted HDD? I hear that reformatting isn't enough to erase files
