Christmas Giveaway Recover My Files

Recover My Files is a commercial data recovery software for Microsoft's Windows operating system to restore deleted files.

There are basically two options when you are dealing with data loss: the first is to access data backups to recover files, while the second relies on file recovery software to recover the data. What many users do not know is the fact that the operating system is not removing files completely from the hard drive if the user or a program deletes them.

All that it does for performance sake is to overwrite the information where the file is located on the computer's hard drive. That's the reason why file recovery software is usually able to recover files on hard drives with an increased chance if the deletion did not happen to long ago (the only danger to those deleted files is that they are fully or partially overwritten by new data).

Recover My Files

Recover My Files is an award winning file recovery software for the Windows operating system that is actually more than just another data recovery software. Let us look at the basics first.

Recover My Files starts with a wizard after installation that can be used to configure a file or drive recovery process. This wizard does not have to be used but it can streamline the process so that it becomes easier for inexperienced users.

Recover Files allows a user to recover:

• individual files have been deleted and emptied from the Windows Recycle Bin.
• files have been deleted and bypassed the Windows Recycle Bin.
• files have been deleted by a virus, trojan or worm.
• a file of the same name has saved over another important file.
• files have been lost by some other unknown cause.

Recover Drive allows a user to recover files if

• a drive has been formatted;
• a drive has been formatted and windows has been reinstalled;
• a Windows recovery or system restore has resulted in a fresh installation of Windows and the previous user created files are missing;
• a drive letter has gone missing;
• the drive is recognized by your PC as RAW and not files can be read;
• or some other problem has effected the entire contents of the drive

It is furthermore possible to add Raid information or a disk image to the recovery process. Recover My Files offers two modes of searching for recovered files. The first is an automatic search on a computer's hard drive for all deleted files, or to perform the search for deleted files and afterwards for files that are no longer listed in the Filesystem but with content on the hard drive. The second file recovery option is more thorough but takes longer to complete.

The computer user can select specific file types that should be recovered, e.g. Microsoft Office documents, database and financial files, archives or photos.

The scan itself will check every sector of the selected hard drive for files that match the types selected by the user, and displays those in the results list as well. This obviously takes longer than the first recovery option but usually yields better results.

The data recovery software will sometimes display generic names instead of the original files names which can be attributed to lost file information. It is still possible to recover those files if they are displayed in the result list (but it may sometimes be difficult to identify them properly).

Recoverable files can be selected and saved to the computer system. It is recommended to save them to a different hard drive to avoid them overwriting part of the files that have not been recovered yet.

Drive Recovery

Drive recovery is the second option that Recover My Files provides. Here it is again possible to perform a quick search for missing drives, or to specify additional files for the sector based search of the hard drive. The search itself is divided into two phases:

• Phase 1: of the search attempts to locate and rebuild then entire lost partitions. Partition recovery should take between 1 - 45 minutes to complete (depending on the size of the drive, the number of files that it contains and the speed of the computer / drive). Learn about steps within phase 1 - partition recovery.
• Phase 2 of the search will automatically commence. Phase 2 uses the selected file types to help locate the missing Filesystem records (the file and folder structure) on the drive

File recovery reports can be printed, exported to csv for further analysis.

Verdict

Recover My Files is an excellent file recovery software. The disk recovery option sets it apart from many free file recovery software programs that usually do not come with those options. Users who are interested in the program can download it from the developer's website. The program is fully functional except for the ability to save files that have been discovered by the program.

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