Active Data Recovery's software is a straightforward, unassuming utility that doesn’t resort to a lot of flashy graphics and follows the Windows Explorer standard interface fairly closely, so it’s familiar and easy to get to grips with.

The application window is split into three panes: a vertical directory tree on the left, a file view at top right and a tabbed pane at bottom right.

This has tabs for a log of the actions of Undelete; a properties view that shows the properties of any file selected in the file view; a search results pane, a disk hex editor that allows direct viewing and editing of data bytes within a selected file; plus a drag-and-drop pane where you can drag any file from the upper file pane for recovery.

On initialisation Active@ Undelete shows a drive list in the directory tree view; a device list in the file view and start activity in the log view. It also recognises and identifies all storage devices present.

To get started you need to select a storage device and then select simple or advanced scan from the pop-up. A simple scan of our test machine took about two minutes for a 38GB volume.

Active@ Undelete can recover deleted and formatted data from hard drives, floppy disks, basic and dynamic volumes, hardware or software Raid (levels 0 and 5).

Compressed, encrypted and fragmented files are supported. Besides hard disk drives and floppies, recovery from removable devices such as SD, CF, Smartmedia, Memory Stick, zip drives, USB hard drives and so on is also supported.

There’s an evaluation version to download, which has full functionality but is limited to a maximum of 64KB file size.

An Enterprise Edition is also available with advanced capabilities to access and perform data recovery on remote machines; it supports data recovery from other Raid configurations: spanned, mirrored (Raid 1), striped (Raid 0) and Raid 5 volumes.

This article is part of a grooup test. All articles in the test are as follows:
A quick recovery 
Active Data Recovery Active@ Undelete
Binary Biz Virtual Lab
Ontrack Easy Recovery Lite
PC Tools File Recover 5
R-Tools Technology R-Studio 
Stellar Phoenix Fat + NTFS 
Retaining control of your data 
Broken drives and professional data retrieval labs