Pandora Recovery is compatible with all Windows NT operating systems including Windows NT, Windows XP and Windows Vista. The recovery software provides some interesting features that most of the other software programs do not offer. It lists the available partitions and hard drives and the user can start a scan immediately by clicking on one of the partitions. This will scan the partition for all deleted file information.

The user can browse the partition after the scan. The software application is displaying the name of the deleted file, the path, the creation and modification date and the percentage that it is overwritten. Overwritten files have a lesser chance of being fully recoverable.

Pandora Recovery provides access to a file search as well which can be used to find specific files on a partition. Files can be filtered by partition, name, size and date. The application is also displaying overall statistics about the amount of deleted files that are not overwritten, partially overwritten and completely overwritten.

To recover deleted files the user would simply right-click a file or folder and choose the Recover To option from the context menu. It does also provide the option to quick view the file which can display the contents of the files or show the contents as text if no viewer has been found for the file.

The third function is a deep surface scan which can find file information in the following three cases:

• Recovery of files whose MFT record has been reused by OS.
• Recovery of files from reformatted media.
• Recovery of files from discs with damaged or missing file allocation table.

Think of it as a deep scan which takes much longer to be performed but is more thorough. The additional information and the surface scan are great aids when trying to recover deleted files on a partition.

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Another interesting aspect of that scan for deleted files is the option to preview items before they are recovered. Every file can be marked and a click on the preview button opens the file in the default viewer. It becomes pretty obvious if a file can be recovered, chances are slim if the default viewer cannot open it. If the file displays fine on the other hand chances are good that it can be recovered without difficulties.

Undelete My Files provides access to two specialized recovery operations: Media and Mail Recovery. Both target specific files and try to recover them. The advantage of using Media Recovery is that it specifically targets multimedia files offering a preview pane for quick file previews.

Mail Rescue tries to recover Microsoft Outlook Express, MS Outlook, Eudora and Netscape mails. The software automatically tries to locate the installation folders and proposes a system scan if none can be found.

Another function provided by Undelete My Files is the Advanced File Search. That’s a nice function if you know what you are looking for. You can pinpoint the tool to search specific folders, look for certain names and file types, sizes and attributes. Pretty convenient if you want to recover specific files.

The last two functions are not related to file recovery. The first is a disk wiper that deleted existing files on the disk securely so that they cannot be recovered by normal means. The other the creation of a Emergency Disk Image which creates a snapshot of a disk to work with later on. That’s actually a great idea to prevent that deleted files are overwritten by new files and the same way professionals are handling this issue.

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Free Undelete scans one partition of the hard drive and provides access to all recoverable files and folders that it found during the scan. The scan itself is surprisingly fast, faster than the one by Recuva but this could be due to the way both applications present the data after the scan. Recuva is displaying all files it found in the main window while Free Undelete displays the folder structure of the files.

That’s a great approach if you can remember the folder names of the files that you want to recover. If you cannot remember them you are in for some folder clicking until you find the files that you want to recover because Free Undelete does not offer a search, only a filter that filters the current results by filename and folder name.

This difference matters only if specific files have to be recovered. It is easier to recover all files and folders with Free Undelete because it displays less of them in the main interface. A tip is to always recover files on a different partition than the one the files are being recovered from. It could happen otherwise that recovered files are stored in locations of files that are still to be recovered which will obviously fail then.

If you only have one partition I suggest to use an external device, USB drive, external hard drive or similar to store the files temporary on that device.

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I was thinking of something different though. What if I want to keep my hard drives for now but make sure that deleted data can’t be recovered by any means ? I tried and ran some file recovery programs such as Recuva and it showed thousands of files that were still referenced on my system although they have been deleted before. I think that this is a privacy problem and decided to look for a way to delete all file information on the unused part of my hard drives.

I decided to use Recuva first and see how many file information it would find. After that I would run a program named Eraser which I will use to clean the unused disk space of any deleted file information and finally run Recuva again to see if this reduced the amount of files that could be undeleted from my system.

Testing my Hard Drive with Recuva:

Recuva found 33720 files on my hard drive f: that could be undeleted. This is a large amount of files.

Running Eraser:

After right-clicking the central pane I was able to create a new task. The first option was unused space on drive which is the default option in the menu. I selected the f: hard drive from the list. Eraser was showing my newly selected task in the central pane and I had to right-click that task once again and select Run from the context menu. It took two and a half hours to overwrite all the data on my 100 gigabyte hard drive.

Testing the result with Recuva:

Recuva found one file on drive f: Everything else was not found anymore which leads to the conclusion that this is an excellent way to erase file information that exists on the unused space on your hard drives. This is probably not enough to erase it for the big boys if you know what I mean but every amateur should have problems getting information about those files.

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PC Inspector is avilable for every Windows operating system starting with Windows 95. The tool has a great chance of success if you are using it right after you found out about the data loss. You should also remember that PC Inspector is not able to recover files from hard drives that are no longer recognised by either the bios or windows.

Some of its features are:

• Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged

• Recovers files with the original time and date stamp

• Supports the saving of recovered fimmediatelytwork drives

• Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. Competition products cannot recover such files.

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