15-Minute Reviews :: Elprime Media Recovery v1.0

Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of 15-Minute Reviews. Today’s application is Elprime Media Recovery version 1.0 by Elprime Software – An application to help you recover files from various media.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Elprime Media Recovery is the professional data recovery software for scratched, damaged or defective CD and DVD disks, USB flash drives, memory cards, floppy disks and other storage media.

It uses an advanced data recovery technology to access and recover inaccessible files in Windows operating system. Elprime Media Recovery can recover all known file types and allows preview of recovered files too.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is easy to use
• Appeared to work on a CD that is tempermental for me
• Support for solid-state media a good thing

Quick Cons

• Does not recover music CD tracks, only track CDA headers
• File at a time may be painful for a disc or other media entirely damaged
• Requires media to be in good enough condition to mount as well as the file allocation table be stable

Expansion

With the amount of media that is available and how often it is handled, damaging accidents do happen. This application aids with the ‘at-home’ recovery of important information from damaged media and hopefully brings back what was once lost.

I first started with my two worst culprits; I have two music CDs that ended up falling out of my visor CD holder and under the seat to get scratched underneath the seat. While both are playable, tracks near the middle tend to skip a lot. I tried both, both displaying all blue blocks, but for some reason ‘recovery’ went way too fast. I popped open the recovery folder to find that the .cda files were there, but it was only the header .cda files and not the PCM or WAV files. That was unfortunate, since that is my worst discs to test.

I tried my last disc that I have problems with; A backup disc of my personal work. I usually have problems with one file coming off the disc, usually requiring 6 or 7 tries before it would come down. So I gave the file a try, and it seemed to do it without a hitch; All blue boxes and ran through quickly, pulling the file off flawlessly, and is good condition coming off (I could tell it was bad before, because about 3 lines of text would be garbled.)

On the positive side of this application, the interface is easy to use. Might have been nice to add an ‘Ellipsis’ button next to the Source and Destination box as well as the buttons above. The fact that the application supports solid-state memory as well is a good thing; While typically more ‘durable’ than CDs or DVDs, it is still susceptible to failure, especially after a visit to the washer. It also did work on my backup CD as well, which wasn’t a total failure, but still worked.

With this application, it does require the media to be mountable (IE:- able to get as far as showing up as a drive on your computer.) and by the looks of it requires the file allocation tables to be intact for the file you wish to recover. If you can’t mount the media and browse to the file, you won’t be able to recover the file. There is no options to attempt to recover the file allocation table or similar, so if this is damaged, you will have to seek out other software to fix it, or find a professional data recovery expert to aid you.

As well, as noted above, it can not be used to recover music CDs; It only recovers the header .cda file, and nothing else. This would have been my common use for this application.

I must note that with no batch functionality, I am concerned. I would not want to use this application to recover a good portion of a client CD or backup CD. I know you could try to copy all the files you could at first, and make a list of which don’t work to use this on, but it would have made far more sense to have a ‘batch’ or full media recovery option as well. This is a very big limiting factor of this application.

Final Verdict

While it did work on a temperamental CD, it would not recover music CDs due to lack of support for reading anything except the header file. While this application may be handy for single-file or few-file damage, it would be very painful to recover an entire CD with this application as since there is no batch functionality. While free, I would definitely recommend giving it a try, especially if there is a bad file you really need to bring back from some media. As for paying $55 for it, although still far cheaper than hiring a data recovery specialist, is a fairly high price for a lack of features and a sense of ‘advanced’ recovery.

Some alternatives ate CD Recovery Toolbox (Free) and PC Inspector File Recovery (Free) (Thanks “Belgian Dude”) as well as Multi Data Rescue ($39.95) plus many more if you search.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, May 14, 2007