R-Studio has been around since 2002, or may earlier then that, but came into proper existence since 2002. It has been the first automated GUI application apart from Easy Recovery from Kroll Ontrack and Lost & Found (do not know where it has gone now?) who together were the most selling applications in retail and through websites.

The first time when got the chance to review R-tt’s “Recovery Studio” (might be the exact name thought by the developers, which they abbreviated later as R-Studio) it was an era of DOS based recovery applications. Even with its first release, the developers were able to design nice recovery software, which was able to recover data from both FAT & NTFS files systems.

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Coming to present day released version of R-Studio version4, they have come a long way in data recovery. R-Studio has been an inspiration to many application designed since then. I myself personally have been following all of their releases and now they are able to handle FAT, NTFS, Ext2FS and now HFS, HFS+ file systems on Windows.

Recently launched versions had some problems, but maybe due to complaints and bugs received. Re-released with small updates to correct those issues and the most recent launched version seems to be stable.

Some of the merits of R-Studio

• Best ever algorithm designed to deal with NTFS file system (They should release a book on NTFS file system ).
• Extremely good in handling large partitions problems, most effective in recovering lost partitions. Recovery of lost data from re-formatted drive (FAT formatted as NTFS or vice versa) is the best in industry.
• Industrial strength, by virtue of file recovery module to recover files, even when file system is “completely damaged” and when there are not traces to find files or create a tree structure based on the file system is lifesaver. Recovering files over network gives extra edge as an enterprise user.
• RAID de-striping module is also the best to handle recovery from RAID arrays (RAID 5, RAID 0 or RAID 1)

Some of the demerits

• Partition or disk selection choice is most complex design that we could see in any recovery application
• Color marking probable lost partition can be confusing to any one, even to professionals.
  Weak copy protection of the software (May be it is in their plan of their viral marketing).

I might not be a certified reviewer or certifying body to authorize and review any application, but to me it is an honest review about all my favorite data recovery applications, including this one.

Most of the recovery software reviews you would find over internet seem to be reviewing based on the features, which they could easily find on vendor’s website or on the pricing. It has not been a significant review website, which could review these “niche segment” of applications gradually becoming a category in this software industry as Data Recovery Software.

I think by reading this post, you would understand why I rate R-studio so high. To prove more, Seagate a “hard drive giant”, has started its own data recovery portal and provides recovery services to all its buyers looking for recovery of their critical data. They have procured a small component from R-Studio and are selling them as DIY (Do it on your own) File Recovery software. The File recovery software is lighter version of R-Studio and performs deleted file recovery and file recovery on Windows.

How do I know? I read lot about lot of recovery software and keep a track on what is happening around them?