15-Minute Reviews :: Smart Data Recovery v3.8

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on Smart Data Recovery version 3.8 by Smart PC Solutions, Inc. – An application to aid in the recovery of deleted/lost files.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Smart Data Recovery is a data recovery tool for Windows operating system that supports the FAT and NTFS file systems. Smart Data Recovery is an effective and powerful, easy-to-use software program that enables the recovery of lost data.

Smart Data Recovery is compatible with almost all kinds of data storage – from computer hard drives to digital cameras. It also supports flash drives, USB drives, floppy disks, memory sticks, PC cards, multimedia cards, and secure digital cards. Smart Data Recovery is able to restore all sorts of files, including electronic documents and pictures.

It restores files from FAT32 and NTFS hard drives, has really simple interface and is compatible with Windows operations systems. Our aim is to prevent information loss, and prevent you from wasting your time and money. For different reasons, important documents and user files are sometimes lost. Without a recovery tool for documents and files, this may become a huge problem (one that leads to considerable inconveniences, and requires expensive solutions).”

Quick Pros

• It looks pretty
• Did find a few files
• Has a wipe feature

Quick Cons

• Have to go through folder by folder to restore
• Options are so limited – Not much can be done with it
• Limited to 11 file masks or all files
• Doesn’t put files back in original location
• Did not find many files, including ones just deleted

Expansion

Upon your launch of this application, you will be greeted by a very flashy small window. Within this window you’ll see a drop-down box for which drive to scan (Sorry, can’t scan by directory), which type of files to scan for (Either all or just a single file format from a list of 11 file formats), an image of a hard drive which becomes animated during scanning with a progress bar and scanned info below, and finally a large stylized find and close button. There are also some common buttons along the top right edge of the screen next to minimize and close; Most notably, the Settings button, which gives you a dialog box to tell the application where to deposit the original files. Once you have searched for files on a drive and if the application does find files, it will bring up a second window. The top of the window is a two-pane layout; The left being the directory structure, the right showing recoverable files within the selected folder, date, time, size and recoverability. Below that is a find box, and three buttons; Restore, Wipe and Close.

During my first scan with the application, it appears to have found four files in total; a txt file, a tmp file, a log file and a dll. Recovering these files were a bit tedious – You have to go into each folder and choose to recover each folder, one folder at a time. All but the DLL came up as Good chances for recovery; The DLL was Poor. After recovering the four files I examined the txt file and the log file; They both came out as 128kb size, which wasn’t a good sign. Upon opening them, as you’ll see in the screenshot here, was filled with bad characters for the entire file – No data. There was no way to test the DLL or the .tmp file however.

A few things with the first recovery. Even if the application knows the destination, the application insists in placing it back in the recovery folder. You also (as mentioned above) have to hop from folder to folder selecting what you want recovered (Or use the Check All button) and Restore and restore each group. When you do restore, you get the message ‘Some files may be damaged or rewritten. Their restoration may be impossible for technical reasons. There is no 100 per cent guarantee for the estoration of data. Thank you for your understanding’

After the first test run not coming out stellar, it was decided to do some controlled testing – Very simple tasks. I created three test text files, each one with specific text in each one. Before anything else was done, I immediately deleted the last one (while the application was still up) and ran a scan. Didn’t find anything except desktop.ini (Which I didn’t delete). I deleted the other two txt files and turned on the mask function, and nothing showed up again. Finally, I deleted the four files I originally recovered just to try. This time two of the four files popped up; the log file was stated to be in Good condition, the tmp file was Poor. The hit-rate for finding files is just abysmal. (Note: Testing was done with everything off on the system to ensure overwriting of good data wouldn’t occur – The tests with the txt files has always worked with other tools at minimum.)

The application does have a Wipe feature – Unfortunately it can only wipe files it can find – There is no capability to clean empty space or wiping files you choose that haven’t been erased already.

Final Verdict

From the initial testing of this application, the accuracy of this application is awful at best and it’s interface is terrible to use beyond the glitz and glamor – More effort should have been put into polishing the actual workings of the application, instead of making it pretty. I’m not quite sure how this tool has made it to version 3.8 on its own. For free or for its sticker price of $49.95, either way its not worth it – All it offers is a small sense of hope which will likely be crushed. Shop around some – There are plenty of tools out there that do their job at recovering files.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, February 06, 2008