Worked as expected

Pros: I was preparing to set up my hard drives in a Raid 0 configuration. I moved all the data I wanted to my external hard drive, so it would be safe. Then I set up Raid 0 configuration. After I set up the Raid 0, I started to install windows again, since setting up the Raid 0 makes that data useless on the two hard drives. I have installed windows several times in the past, so I was hurrying along through the installation. I got to the part where I had to pick the partition to use for windows. Well my new Raid 0 configuration was the same size as my external drive, that I left plugged in for some reason. Without even thinking I deleted the first partition on the list assuming it was the RAID 0 configuration. Oops! I really felt dumb having installed windows several times before. Moral of the story is disconnect the drive with all the important data to prevent doing what I did. Anyways I left the partition deleted as is.

I went through about 6 other programs before trying this one. Only one of the programs I tried worked for what I was trying do, it charged per MB recovery. Ouch! I wanted to restore about 200GB of data. I didn't really think that was cost effective, since it would have been several thousands of dollars. I could get it done cheaper by taking it to a professional. The free programs I tried either only recovered certain file types, or never made any progress scanning my hard disk. I let one run for about 20 hrs, nothing! A few wouldn't recognize/access my hard drive.

I tested this guy out and it scanned the disk just fine it took a little under 6 hours to scan a 320GB drive. There is actually a progress graph, so I could see what it was doing. I found all my files in the exact same folder structure that I had left them in. There were a few extra folders such as system volume info and recycle and a couple others. It also showed all the extra found files on the drive. I am assuming they were defrag files since they were all fragments of files. All of the features are available on the demo except the restore feature. The restore feature is actually available on the demo, but it will only restore any file under 64KB. If the file you are looking for is under 64KB you can do it for free on this program.

I purchased the key for the program and it was given to be immediately after processing my credit card. No need to wait for an email. I did receive the email with the key a few seconds later, so I guess I didn't save that much time. The program was able to restore all file types even the ones that weren't on its lengthy list of recognized files. It took about 5 hours to restore the 200GB of lost data to my new RAID 0 configuration. All file attributes and meta data were restored with the files. If you select restore from Root it will restore all the files you selected to restore in their same folder structure. Except for the fact they were in a folder called root. All the files kept their same file name. I was happy to see that. I didn't want to have to rename any or get a program to rename multiple files.

Cons: Too bad it wasn't free. Oh well. The thing I didn't like was the messages for any conflicts when restoring files. If you selected "do this for all files" it would do what ever you selected for any message that popped up. Regardless of what it was saying. It didn't actually cause a problem since since all it didn't end up restoring was Vista thumbnails or duplicate files. There is a log at the bottom of the GUI showing pretty much everything you want to know. It seemed like a lot of errors but it was mostly just thumbnail files not being restored. No biggie since windows is set up to generate those thumbnails.

Posted: 22-Jul-2008 05:32:41 PM