News :: 15MR: MultiStage Recovery v2.7

Welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is MultiStage Recovery version 2.7 by Enplase Research Corporation—A file recovery application for multiple media formats.

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“MultiStage Recovery is professional data recovery software for Windows. It can recover files from hard disks, floppy disks, flash drives, digital camera cards, and other digital storage devices.

With comprehensive detection, it finds EVERYTHING that can be restored.

_The application is extremely easy-to-use, and no special skills are required. It supports ALL Windows file systems including NTFS/NTFS5, FAT12/16/32.”_

Quick Pros

• Decent scanning speed
• Could recover two smaller files (Two .jpgs, one 9K, other 12K)
• Came up with a lot of files on my USB drive; Could recover some older files
• Found few images on my digital camera of prior from when drive was filled
• Built-in previewer handy for seeing some types of files recoverability.

Quick Cons

• Have to switch to ‘Search only for deleted files’ for NTFS
• Locations of deleted files sometimes not accurate for NTFS
• Only had any results recovering 2 out of about 30 files I tried to recover under NTFS
• Could not recover or detect a .png (200K) I deleted in a test situation on the NTFS drive
• Could not recover but detected a .txt file I deleted in a test situation on the USB drive (FAT32)

Expansion

This application did show a lot of promise. Using this application was fairly straightforward when I realized you had to switch the NTFS setting. While the dialog box for where to save the file does not have a title (leading me to have to figure it meant ‘save file to?’ box, which I was correct,) I did manage to recover 2 deleted jpegs I had from about a week ago; both were in good condition. However, this was about the extent of my luck; I tried over 30 more files to no avail, some deleted just this morning. So, in a test situation, I closed every single application open to minimize the chance of any external writing out, created a quick .png file by copying another. I then deleted the original, and then immediately switched back to the application and performed a rescan, and it did not find it at all. I performed a search and it could not find the file. I closed the application (knowing fully that possibly the closing process may overwrite the file) and reopened it and tried again. Nothing.

Under NTFS, I found that it did ‘find’ files that I know were elsewhere in the directory structure but happened to land in another folder; For example, a photo ended up being tagged inside of a game folder (Battlefield 2142.) There were a series of other glitches (bad file names, folders filled with rubbish.) I feel that NTFS support is not as well developed as is claimed.

I then moved onto my 32MB USB drive. I manipulate a lot on this drive so it should have a lot, and since it has FAT32, it may have more luck (The application appears to be stronger in FAT32—Uncommon but not rare this day and age.) I scanned this drive and saw a small army of deleted folders and files pop up, some dating back upwards of a month old. While I could recover some, alas, still couldn’t recover many. I performed the same test as I did with my primary NTFS drive using a .txt file I had on the drive. This time I knew I did not have any applications that actively wrote to the drive so there should have been a far better chance of recovery. The file did recover; However, the details within were garbage. Nothing usable.

I proceeded to my digital camera. I know it was only about 1/8th full and wanted to see what it could pull up. Here I had some luck; While I still could not recover all 26 images it pulled up, I could recover 12 of them. IA lot better than my luck with other media, but that is likely because of the nature of the writing method when taking pictures. I do question how many it did find; I did have over 100 pictures on it just a short while ago, and since then the camera had only been filled to 11 images, it still did not appear to have the greatest luck on detecting all the images which may have been on there.

Final Verdict

While I did have some positive results, the two cases which I performed a controlled test (More notably controlled on the USB drive,) did not have good results does bother me a bit. NTFS support seems to be far weaker than FAT/FAT32 support significantly, not only having to switch into search for only deleted files mode, but far less options and even less results than FAT32 testing I performed. All-in-all, it seems awfully weak in terms of recoverability; While part of it may be that the application is weak in detecting what is truly recoverable more so than its recovery ability, there is clearly a possible issue with its ability to recover useful data. While I did have some positive results, as mentioned, my testing did fail.

While it may be good to grab while it is free for those ‘in-case’ situations, I feel that you may want to get another application to be sure you are getting the best results. As for paying for this application, I feel that $49.95 is a little steep for the results I saw. There are some other alternatives, however I can not vouch for their abilities. You may want to read through the comments at Giveaway of the Day for potential alternatives.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, March 27, 2007