File Repair, Fix Damaged, Corrupt Files

There are numerous reasons why files become corrupt or damaged. Possible reasons include malware that modifies files, application failures, crashes, network errors or manual tampering with the file contents. Damaged files usually cannot be read or opened anymore on the system, which can be problematic if the files are important and need to be accessed.

File Repair is a free software for Windows that can fix corrupt file types. The program can repair the following types of files:

• Word documents: doc, docx, docm, rtf
• Excel speadsheets: xls, xlsx, xla
• Zip and rar archives
• Video formats: avi, mp4, mov, wmv, asf, mpg
• Image formats: jpeg, gif, tiff, bmp, png, raw images
• PDF documents
• Access databases: mdb, mde, accdb, accde
• PowerPoint presentations: ppt, pps, pptx
• Music formats: mp3, wav

Support for that many file types is one of the strengths of the file recovery software. It should be clear that the software won't be able to repair every corrupt file type, as it depends a lot on the corruption or damage itself. A file that has a size of 0 bytes after a crash cannot be repaired by the application for instance.

File Repair can fix the following common errors:

• The format of the file is not recognized by the application.
• The file cannot be read
• The file cannot be accessed
• The default application for the file type cannot open the file
• low system resource errors, out of memory errors.

Here is how the repair works:

You select a single source file under "Select the source file to be repaired". A click on the ... opens a file browser that you use to select a file that you want repaired.

A click on start repair tries to repair the file. The file will be saved in the same directory but with a different file name. The original file is left untouched which means you do not need to create a backup of it before repairing it in the software.

The process log details the repair process. File Repair tries to read the document and recover data that is not readable anymore. This usually takes less than a minute to complete.

Users with multiple corrupt or damaged files need to add and repair every file individually, which is not very comfortable. Options to use the command line or a batch mode would be more than welcome.

Still, File Repair can be used if you are out of options and need access to a damaged file. The freeware can be downloaded from the developer website. It should be compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system. It was tested on a 64-bit Windows 7 system.

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