15-Minute Reviews :: Data Recovery Wizard v4.3.6

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on Data Recovery Wizard version 4.3.6 by CHENGDU YIWO Tech Development – An application to aid in the recovery of deleted files, partitions or corrupted drives.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard is a complete range of data recovery software for all Windows platforms that supports Undelete and Unformat for various file systems including FAT, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS on various storage media. Data Recovery Wizard ensures safe and precise file recovery against numerous threats like accidental file deletion and disk formatting.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is very simple to use
• Ample warnings about install and recovery overwriting other deleted data
• Three different modes for different uses
• Complete recovery and partition recovery modes more thorough but slower

Quick Cons

• Complete and partition recovery modes appear to deposit their recovered files in a sub-directory
• Could not find test files in file recovery mode
• Complete and partition recovery modes came up with 29 partitions with no explanation

Expansion

Upon launching the application for the first time, you are greeted by a very simple interface. In the middle of the first window is a set of 3 buttons; File Recovery, Complete Recovery and Partition Recovery. Each of the modes are explained on mouseover in a box below the buttons. File Recovery mode is designed to quickly find recently deleted files and allow you to recover them to their original location. Complete and partition recovery modes are essentially the same with just slightly different aspects from what has been observed so far (though testing with crashed/deleted drives and partitions is outside the scope of this application.)

Upon clicking on the mode you wish will take you down the path of choosing whichever drive you’d wish to work with and then proceeds to scan. In the case of the file recovery mode, the scan goes very quick, and then proceeds to offer you a listing of all the files it can recover in a tree-like location, representing either its original home, or if the location information is lost or corrupted it will show it in a separate folder called ‘LostFiles.’ You can pick and choose via check boxes which files to recover, and then recover them. In the other two modes, the process is essentially the same with an added step of choosing which partition(s) to recover from and it will show all files it could find, and not just deleted files. Both of these modes prompt you to save the files to an end-location in its own folder during my testing, which is good and bad (as listed as a con above). There can be a benefit of having the application write to a different location if you want to back up information without the risk of overwriting; However, if you are looking to use this to recover a corrupted drive, there would become an extra step of moving the files back into their original location. This process may be different on a corrupt or dead drive, so this may actually be a feature in the end – It was just a nuisance if you were using these two modes to recover files and having to move them back into position.

During testing of this application, a series of files were created as well as a few copied onto the drive, which then were promptly deleted from the drive (as with a few items already on the drive). Using the deleted file recovery mode, it pulled up a few miscellaneous files from around the system (mostly from the internet cache) and only one out of 10 test files. Trying a few times more, and the deleted file recovery mode didn’t fare very well. Next tested was both the complete recovery and partition recovery – Both seem to function the same overall. Both were capable of finding all the deleted files in the test and recover them successfully, as well as it detected a lot more files that were long-past deleted as well and appeared to recover those relatively accurately as well. The one issue had was that when both modes were launched, there was a total of 29 ‘partitions’ found. The first had most of the files, but the next two partitions had listed quite a few files inside; The remainder had a few listed folders. There is no explanation in the application itself as to why there ends up being so many listed partitions, and the helpfile only seems to explain that there will be a number that show up, and that it will choose the best one for you initially. After using the selection the application made in the previous testing, I tried opening up the next partition down, and found a series of lost files as well as a series of raw files that were found (Assuming it was using header/footer information to find these files – There is no file names). For those who may be a little more desperate to find a file, that may be another choice is to check all the partitions with found files in them.

Final Verdict

While the deleted file recovery mode appears to be lacking quite a bit, the complete and partition recovery modes may be the way to go with this application to have a better chance of finding lost files. For free, if you are paranoid about data loss, this may be a good tool to compliment another recovery application for overlapping protection. As for paying $69.95 for this title, I would have hoped for a functioning deleted file recovery mode (Maybe port the system for the entire drive search into there?) or a bootdisk-based solution, though it does come down to a matter of how much is your data worth.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, March 13, 2008