15-Minute Reviews :: MultiStage v3.6 (Quick)

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is MultiStage version 3.6 by Enplase Research Corporation – An application to aid you in recovering lost files from various media such as hard drives, flash media and memory cards.

This title has been previously reviewed by myself. Review of MultiStage 2.7 – This is a quick review because I do not have the ability to test extensively today.

Software Description

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, the software finds EVERYTHING that can be restored and it is able to salvage files even in the most difficult cases when you re-formatted a FAT drive with NTFS or vice versa.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

• Significant improvement in NTFS support
• Found and could recover 315 different files with missing NTFS files option
• Low-level scan, while limited in functionality, recovered a lot of files
• Differentiation of features between scanning drives either formatted or not

Quick Cons

• Would be nice to reorganize and work with results as a whole
• NTFS support could continue to expand
• Selection window for low-level file search could be improved
• Search could be improved to search within files as well
• Need USB drive support for professionals

Note: See previous review as well.

Expansion

While it has been a while since I’ve previously reviewed this title at version 2.7, it seems that it has improved quite a bit, especially in the department of NTFS support. While I did not have a great amount of time or equipment (My USB drives or memory cards) to test fully on, I did run a missing NTFS files scan (Which was not previously available) on my drive. To my surprise, it found a total of 315 previously-deleted files; Granted, some were duplicates, all the ones I tried to recover were recoverable (I tried 30 different files at random and verified they functioned). A definite improvement over the previous version’s NTFS shortcomings for sure.

I also decided to go ahead and try a low-level file search on the same drive as well; This differs from the missing NTFS functionaliy in that it scans the actual drive contents for files that look like a filetype (or set of filetypes) that you chose. While the list isn’t as extensive as one may hope (Some files just don’t have a distinguishable header/footer area such as text-based files). This drive gets wiped often (Quick format) for the purpose of reviewing software titles. I was shocked to see some of the files that were returned. The are I was specifically focussed on was JPEGs – It detected 2167 different JPEGs and from me thumbing through them I realized some of the JPEGs that this application picked up (Even when not using the formatted drive option) from a format ago, and possibly even further back than that. Some were corrupted, but a surprising number of them were fine (I would say over 90% from me scrolling through the thumbnails). Most of these JPEGs were from my browser cache as well, which was creepy in itself. This has definitely improved in strength and quality since my last review on the NTFS filesystem by far.

I do hope this application continues to expand and build up as well. I do feel that the organization system for files could expand further; I’m not greatly fond of being limited to all the files clumped based on file extension alone. There may be times when I want to review all of the files as a whole rather than extension at a time. As well, I do feel that the NTFS support, while it is strong now, could keep expanding. For the low-level search, it really needs to report back a filesize other than 2048KB for all files, and would be grand if it told us the file condition as it would for FAT/FAT32. Creation and modification times would be nice too, but that’d be a bonus.

I do wish that the dialog box for low level file search would be improved. As it is, you have to scroll around, and the box is not resizable. I have more than enough screen real-estate to see all the entries, but for some reason the author chose to make the box static-sized.

On a final note, another feature that should be expanded is search functionality. I’d really like to be able to search within files as well as just filenames; There may be times normally where you may remember the contents of a file instead of the name of the file, and may make it far easier to search; Especially when you’re talking hundreds, even thousands of results.

Final Verdict

All-in-all I like the direction this application is expanding. The application does need to continue building and expanding further in my opinion, but is getting to a comfortable level for usability and capability of recovery, especially under NTFS. For free, if you think you may ever need to recover a file from a hard drive, flash drive, memory card or other forms of storage, this would be a keeper. As for paying $49.95 for this title, this title can definitely be worth its price, especially if the file(s) you’re looking for fall into the low-level file search categories.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, September 06, 2007