Contd…

Deleted file recovery, formatted drive recovery, lost partition recovery are some of the options offered by this software to recover data from both FAT and NTFS drives. In some of the tests performed software was able to recover deleted files from both FAT and NTFS drives. It is not so important to mention that overwritten files and fragmented files were not recovered as recovering them using any recovery software is not possible.

However, I expected much from the hex viewer of this software but finally was disappointed as it came out as a mini version of WinHex in a read-only mode. I felt it was wastage of serious programming hours unless they are planning a better release of this component. The hex editor would not be that helpful even for a professional.

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I also found that while scanning either in the standard mode or advance, the scanning works in lot of phases, without even educating user about each process. The software keeps on hitting 100% progress bar many times and user is always in an impression that, “now I would be able to see my lost data", but the process keeps on running.

I specially was amused by its encrypted file recovery where the user is asked to save a file on a FAT partition some times to decrypt a file. A question I would like to ask their developers “What if the file was > 4GB?” FAT file system does not support file size more than 4GB.

In some of the test cases rest some of the features worked up to the satisfaction, the software was able to recover lost partitions, formatted partitions, etc. They have tried to pack the software with more advanced features such as

1. Network drive recovery
2. Disk Imaging
3. Virtual drive creation to recover data from RAID drive arrays
4. Hex editor

But a very important feature this application missed out was RAW file recovery from drives with severe file corruption. Without the valid file system attribute(s) or allocation information no software would be able to pull out RAW data from a drive unless it uses RAW file recovery mode.

Network drive recovery tests were smooth and software was able to recover files from network drives over LAN, however network drives recovery over WAN did not work (may be my connection was too slow for data transfer).

RAID drive recovery module was disappointing, the software creates virtual drives and it would work mostly for healthy RAID arrays with the minor corruptions. This software was not able to identify block size or a parity order on a logically damaged RAID and this would make RAID recoveries extremely difficult. I would say “This application would never be a choice of an expert for recovering RAID drives.”

Finally to conclude this review, we should use this application only when we are looking to recover

• Deleted files
• Formatted drives
• Lost partition recovery

From Windows drive and this software would be able to help in some of the cases. The last touch where a tool becomes expert software is missing from this utility. I would not suggest this tool for novice users as they might have to scratch their heads for some of the options. This utility is best suited for individuals who have some idea about drives and know some operating system basics.