We've all had an 'oh no' moment as precious files disappear from our computer, either through accidental deletion or a serious error. Windows hasn't really deleted them, though, and has merely marked them as being deleted, leaving the files intact on your hard disk. Iolo's Search and Recover 4 aims to bring them back.
Inserting the CD lets you choose to install the software or run it directly from the CD. The latter option is best if you've got files you need to recover now, since installing the software could overwrite the files you want back. The software gives you three options for recovering files: Deleted Files, Deleted Pictures and Movies, and Deleted Songs and Sounds. There's no option to select the file types you're interested in manually, though, or even search for part of a filename.
The process of recovering a file starts a wizard that asks you the location of the deleted files and whether you want to use SmartScan. This technology is supposed to eliminate irrelevant and useless junk files from the searching task, but it obviously decided our deleted pictures were irrelevant and useless. Instead, we had to perform a full sector-level search, which takes a lot longer. The bigger your disk is, the longer this option will take. Fortunately it worked, though, and our deleted pictures were found and displayed as thumbnails. We just had to choose where we wanted to recover the files to. We had more luck with the email recovery, which works with all the main clients including Outlook Express, Outlook and Thunderbird.
The back of the box says the software will recover deleted and damaged partitions, so we tried it on a notebook's badly damaged hard disk. Unfortunately, Search and Recover can't boot from its CD, so you must have a working version of Windows. Transferring the damaged hard disk to a working PC didn't help, and Search and Recover failed to detect the damaged partition or its files. In the end we used WinHex (www.x-ways.net), which is a lot more difficult to use, but it safely recovered our files.
Next we manually deleted a test 512MB partition from our hard disk. After a lengthy scan, Search and Recover decided that all the unpartitioned space (100GB) was our missing partition. We mounted it as a drive, but selecting the Recover option wouldn't let us select the new drive. We tried to view the drive in Windows but it wasn't formatted. The format option was set to format the drive at the hard disk's full capacity, not that partition's 100GB. We were unable to find a way to scan this partition for deleted files, and had to give up.
If you have files that have just been deleted from a fully working hard disk, Search and Recover 4 does a good job of recovering them. If you've got a damaged disk or deleted partition, though, WinHex is much better. If it's really important data, you should consider getting it recovered professionally.
System Specifications
FILE-RECOVERY SOFtWARE Requires Windows 98 or above, 128MB RAM, 10MB disk space
Author: David Ludlow
Computer Shopper Online