Group Test: Data recovery software

The impact of losing your data can vary from being mildly annoying to financially and emotionally catastrophic. Data may be lost through mistaken actions on the part of computer users, virus attack or through software or hardware malfunctions.

Fortunately, modern operating systems make it hard to erase files by mistake and the improved reliability of both software and hardware makes file corruption less common than it used to be.

But prevention is better than cure, and sensible use of disk filing systems, frequent use of computer health check utilities and regular backups of vital data will minimise the possibility of serious data loss.

Unfortunately backup technology hasn’t kept up with mushrooming file and hard disk size, although Blu-ray and HD-DVD recordable technology should provide an economic solution. In the meantime, recordable CD and DVD formats remain the cheapest options.

The main problem with file recovery is that recovered data must be written to ‘safe’ storage.

If data is lost from a PC with a single disk because of hard disk corruption or accidental formatting, then the problem drive will have to be removed and temporarily installed in a fully functioning PC, as an auxiliary drive, before any attempt can be made to recover data from it onto a reliable drive.

Ultimately the decision to go the DIY route on data recovery should be guided by the value of the missing data and your confidence in your own computer skills.

In this group test we review six DIY file recovery utilities that promise to make you better prepared for that rare but awful moment when some truly valuable data goes missing.

This article is part of a grooup test. All articles in the test are as follows:
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

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