Ontrack Easy Recovery Lite

O ntrack is well established in the disk utilities and data recovery market and, in addition to the Easy Recovery range, it offers lab-based data recovery services around the world.

The Easy Recovery Lite version is limited to recovery of 25 files per session. The unlimited version, Easy Recovery Data Recovery, is £151.57 for the download only.

Easy Recovery Lite has a very simple opening user interface with seven main menu buttons displayed in a bold and reassuring graphical style.

On the left are four vertically arranged buttons labelled Data recovery, File repair, Software updates and Crisis centre. Across the top are three buttons accessing the Easy update or Properties windows and the Quick launch pulldown.

You can customise the selections in the Quick launch pulldown to go direct to any feature.

Clicking on Data recovery leads to four further options: Standard recovery, Deleted recovery, Format recovery and Emergency media. Selecting ‘Standard recovery’ starts a scan to identify the available storage partitions.

Once these are identified you can select a partition and start a file retrieval scan. Alternatively, Deleted recovery allows you to home in and retrieve on a file by file basis.

Format recovery allows you to attempt to recover from an accidental disk reformat and Emergency media allows you to create a system boot floppy or bootable CD-Rom. When Standard recovery is selected Easy Recovery Lite identifies and lists the system storage devices.

It recognises hard disks, floppy drives and memory cards but not CD or DVD drives. Select a volume from the device list and click Next to scan for recoverable files. Scans of a 38GB volume took about 42 minutes on our test machine.

Going back to the main menu, File repair leads to an option to repair zipped files, Software updates links to either a product news page or an updates download page and the Crisis centre leads to other Ontrack recovery services if Easy Recovery Lite isn’t up to the job.

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