Repairing .pst files with “scanpst” has never been so successful. Most of the Outlook Mail Recovery software available in the market are quite efficient and can handle all sorts of corruptions with Outlook.

Disk Doctors Outlook Mail Recovery software is one of the helpful tool, which helps in recovering damaged .pst files. The demo version of the software is available for free download from the link mentioned below

Download free mail recovery Demo

The demo version of the software scans for damaged .pst file and allows user to view all his emails in somewhat similar style as Outlook. For real recovery, you have to pay for the software, the demo version would create a .pst file without body contents for your emails, notes etc.

The software has an elegant option of finding .pst files either by displaying the default outlook profile or a user can do a search on his drive if he is not aware of the path where generally outlook keeps its data file.

There were two notable scanning methods offering two level of scanning, one for minor corruptions and other one called “Smart Scan” for severe corruptions of the .pst file. The results when compared to scanpst.exe were far better, and were superior when compared with many other pst repair software which are popular.

The full version of the software creates a new pst file from the damaged pst file, the output pst file can be imported without any hassled in Outlook. The most common problems this software would be handy are

• Repairing 2GB oversized pst file from MS Outlook 2000
• Recovering lost mails, contacts and other attributes of organizing abilities of Outlook

A user who is looking to salvage data from corrupt pst should consider repairing pst file using this email recovery software as the results were better when compared even with many of the popular email recovery software. The software always recovered more number of emails from most of the pst I was able to corrupt.

Competitively priced application is not heavy on the pocket considering the value of pst files having loads of precious emails, contacts etc., if lost can create chaos for a long time to remember.

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.

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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I used to consider this company with its products like Cpatain Nemo, explorer software for Novell servers. I think working with different file systems they got to a great extent needed experience to create an application for data recovery.

The inheritance of GetDataBack has been laid out on the software like Disk Explorer a hex viewer tool. Using this software for more than 3-4 years I got to know more about the usage of this application and got an idea about its recovery capabilities.

GetDataBack is available in two versions; one for recovering data from NTFS formatted drives and other one for recovering data from FAT partititons. I have no complaints about these two separate versions, but a user who is not much aware of the file system might find it difficult to select the file system and even might get confused when to use the application, in case of reformatting from one file system to another.

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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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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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When a partition table gets deleted, corrupted or lost in general, only its entry is removed from first sector of the hard drive; and although the data is no longer available, it still remains on the disk pending to get overwritten. Expert recovery tools can locate lost file systems even if partition table information is missing. Irrespective of the file system and operating system, partition table is always the first physical sector of a hard drive which starts from 0, 0 and 1 which means the 0th cylinder, a 0th head and the 1st sector.

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In my opinion free software should allow that it can be used, studied, and modified without any restriction, and it can be copied and farther distributed in modified or unmodified form. To make this possible the program (called the source code) must be made available. Even though when this application cannot be tagged as an open source it still is available free of cost of recovery.

This application unlike others does not provide the setup using famous “Inno” but uses Install Shield which looks impressive and does the installation quite simply. The application is a multilingual application supporting English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

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