Softlogica has produced Handy Recovery a data recovery software. A popular company already known for its backup software called, “Handy Backup“.

The software impresses particularly with its well thought simple explorer like interface, which is not confusing like R-Studio or Stellar Phoenix. On launching the application, appearance of “tip of the day” demonstrates user friendliness, but just after that the screen goes blank and there are no “quick steps” to follow which could take you to the heart of the application.

Nevertheless, it is simpler to select the drop down list having a catalog of existing logical drives, and to continue recovery by pressing the “analyze” button. In addition, partition search method is easily accessible from the “Tool Bar“, if you are looking to recover data from lost or repartitioned drives.

The “Find Partition” option exhibits industrial strength, a slider to select different portion of a drive or to select a range of sectors to search for a partition is extremely helpful, this option comes in handy when user is aware about the location of the partition on the disk.

In some of the test cases performed, the software successfully recovered deleted files, recovered data from formatted and reformatted partitions, including ADS (Alternate Data Streams), compressed and encrypted files from both NTFS and NTFS 5 partitions.

The core algorithm designed to recover data seems to follow the correct path, the software in its first scan loads all the entries through $MFT and most of the times try to tag and arrange all the file / folder entries into the original hierarchy as they were before the data loss. This helps to provide same tree structure to identify and recover lost data without any hassles.

The “Extended” analysis option provides another important feature of “File Recovery” based on unique file identifiers, popularly known as “File Header", this search would locate unique file identifiers of the selected files types to recover.

Saving recovered data was a delight with this application as some of the small options were extremely helpful, for e.g. while recovering a folder or files from a tree it gives an option to recover data with or without original folder structure, this helps when you do not want the recursive folder structure.

The software has all the required options including, save or loading a recovery session or a partition scan, file filter or a find option for selective recovery. Finally, a must have application for everyone who is looking to recover crucial data from hard drives, USB drives etc. Leaving one or two options here and there, the software has appeared to work and most importantly recovered data.