When I was planning to review Active @ Undelete I always had an impression about them as good NTFS recovery software. I suddenly realized I have seen something similar to Active @ undelete than I explored my collection of shareware and found Arax Disk Doctors which was quite similar to Active @ undelete.

Looking at the two applications the same old question arises “The chicken or the egg? ” There is so much similarity in both these applications that the lost partition search mode takes exactly the same time in both the applications. The user interface of both the applications seems to be from a common UI factory.

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So I felt, it would be better if I proceeded ahead and review Active @ Undelete only. I could remember Active that is Lsoft technologies a.k.a. NTFS.com should be treated as a father of both the applications.

Interface: To me it is the best interface amongst all data recovery applications. However, Arax’s inheritance is more confusing for the first time users. The physical and logical drives are presented with no technical fuss unlike R-tt’s R-Studio. This enables easy recovery either on a physical disk or a logical drive. There are several benefits to it for example when we select a physical drive it is quite clear that there could be these data loss scenarios:

• Lost partition search
• Repartitioned drives, suppose we had two partitions and we created new three partitions and we are trying to locate the older two partitions
• I also would like to create complete image of a hard drive

When we select a logical drive, it is these cases which we are referring to:

• Deleted files recovery
• Formatted drive recovery
• Re-Formatted drive recovery i.e. supposing we had a partition formatted as NTFS and we reformatted the drive as FAT
• Creation of image of a logical drive as well

Cloning of a physical drive or a logical drive is also possible from one drive to another instead of creating an image file of a disk or partition. However, this option was missing from this application.

Part 2 Continued…

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