Of course, prevention (in this case read “backup”) is the best medicine when it comes to lost files, whether as a result of disk malfunctions or your mistakenly deleting them. But for those of us with less foresight, there’s utility software that can save our skins when it comes disappeared files. Today, we investigate three leading software products that claim to be able to find and recover files you’ve deleted or lost to a bad disk drive or media: iolo technologies’ Search and Recover 4, Executive Software’s Undelete 5, and Digital Photo Recovery 2.0.3 from Galaxy.
Even here in the ExtremeTech fold, we have experienced our share of lost work from hard disk failure. Check out our own Jeremy Atkinson’s experience and eventual unleashing of destructive force on a disk that failed to preserve a review he was writing.
You may say: “If the disk has failed, there’s no way outside of super-expensive recovery services to get back the lost files.” Not so fast. In actuality, it turns out that a large percentage of hard drive failures are recoverable via software. At this year’s Def Con hacker convention, Scott Moulton of Forensic Strategy Services made a presentation stating that 85% of hard disk recovery can be accomplished through software. And there are many instances when you’ve simply deleted a file, only to find out that you really need it later. The software we review here is designed for just such circumstances
Aside from hard disk calamities or blunders you may also have lost images or music deleted from your camera media or your digital audio player. Two of the products we review here, Search and Recover and (obviously) Digital Photo Recovery have features designed for just these situations. Undelete is more about recovering hard disk files, and particularly multiple hard disks over a network. Let’s see how the three compare at getting back your lost files.
