On the downside the ability to restore files using the Volume Shadow Copy Service is only available for Windows Vista Ultimate, Enterprise and Business editions.

Shadow Explorer is a software for Windows Vista that makes it possible to restore files using the Volume Shadow Copy Service on all versions of Windows Vista. The program can be installed under Windows XP but it does not work if you execute it.

Shadow Explorer requires administrative privileges to be started. The interface is then providing an explorer like window with information about the stored shadow copies in the header area.

The user can select a different version of the shadow copy that has been saved by using the pulldown menu at the top.

A right-click on selected files or folders opens up a context menu with the option to restore these.

The user can restore files in the same folder or another one. A confirmation dialog pops up if he tries to restore the files in the same folder because they would overwrite the existing files obviously.

A message appears at the end of the operation telling the user if the file restore operation was successful.

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This means that you can’t see the file anymore in Windows while it still exists on your hard drive. File Recovery tools are able to restore those files if no other file has overwritten parts of the deleted one.

Handy Recovery works on every Windows edition including Windows Vista and supports recovery from FAT12/16/32, EFS, NTFS/NTFS 5(including encrypted or compressed ones) and from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.

While tools like Recuva only show a list of files found Handy Recovery displays the complete folder structure including the deleted files. This makes it much easier to locate files that you want to restore. It also displays a probability rating that shows how likely it is that the file can be restored.

It is furthermore possible to scan a drive for files or filetypes. You could use the filter option to search the drive for all deleted mp3 files and select those that you want to restore again.

If the scan of the hard drive did not reveal a file that you want to restore you still have the chance to restore it by using the Extended Analysis option.

If you have analyzed the disk where your deleted files were located (either an existing logical drive or a lost partition) and still cannot find your files in the folder where they were stored, this may be because the corresponding file records have been overwritten. In this case it is impossible to recover file path and name, however there is still a chance that the content of the file is still saved on the disk and has not been overwritten at least partially.

Handy Recovery has two more options that stick our from the rest of the competition. The first is the ability to search for lost partitions and restore files that have been stored on those partitions. The tool either scans a hard drive automatically for lost partitions or lets you choose a range that should be scanned. If a partition has been found it will be added to the list of hard drives.

A unique feature as far as I know is the option to save disk images. This option creates an exact image of a logical drive which means all files and deleted files will be saved in that image. I suppose this is how experts and the police are analyzing the contents of the hard drive.

This way the original partition will be left untouched while it is still possible to recover files from the image.

The mentioned advanced features are only available in the retail version of Handy Recovery (which offers a 30-day trial period) while the others can also be used in the freeware version of it. You can download both from the developers homepage.

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Running Restoration might give you a shock at first use, more than 11000 files were listed on my C: drive that could be restored. That´s a lot of information: I advise everyone to use a file shredder like Eraser for sensitive files and folders. Taking a look at all the 11000 files searching for the files that I would like to restore would take a lot of time, Restoration therefor offers some methods to narrow down the results.

You can sort the results by name, original folder, size and date modified which helps a lot if you know the name of the file or the folder it was in. Restoration also offers the option to enter a partial file name or extension and display only those. This is actually the best option to reduce the amount of files that are displayed. If you are searching for a text document you could make Restoration display all .txt files.

Restoration does not install itself on your system, uninstall and run it from the location that you uninstalled it into. The size is only a little bit more than 400k.

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