It's all too easy to accidentally lose files, either by clearing out the Recycle Bin at the wrong time or through over-zealous pruning.

As if losing them wasn't bad enough, it's not unknown for people to format an entire disk by mistake, destroying everything on it. Getdata's Recover My Files software can save the day in both situations. It is able to retrieve lost files from hard disks, camera memory cards and other forms of removable storage device.

Most people don't think about file recovery software until something goes wrong, at which point they buy a program and find that by installing it, they might overwrite the very data they're trying to retrieve, so full marks to Getdata for providing a version of Recover My Files that runs straight from the CD.

It's also possible to install the program on a second hard disk in the same PC, or on another PC sharing the same network. We recovered everything on a hard disk we had deliberately formatted with no problems, but we were careful to make the recovery attempt immediately after formatting.

Had anything been saved onto the newly-formatted disk prior to the recovery attempt, the data may have been only partially restored. Recovering individual files involves scanning the hard disk. If the aim is to recover recently deleted files for which Windows still has the file information, a fast scan taking an hour or two will suffice.

The deleted files are listed in a window and it's just a question of ticking the ones to pick up and then saving them onto a different hard disk or directly onto a recordable CD or DVD. To recover files deleted at some stage in the past (more than a day or so ago, say), a full disk scan is necessary. This could take many hours for a high-capacity hard disk, and the files found might not be recoverable.

Even when they are, their original file names are not preserved so reinstating them is a tedious business. On the plus side, files are displayed while the scans are still running, so if the ones you want to recover are found early on, it might not be necessary to complete the scan.

Also consider Iolo Search and Recover 4.