As a company, R-Tools Technology is a bit of a mystery since it doesn’t include any company background information on its website and it took a long time to respond to our emails.

However, R-Studio, which it describes as a family of data recovery and undelete utilities, has perhaps the most comprehensive feature set of the six data retrieval tools reviewed here.

In addition to supporting the Windows Fat12/16/32, NTFS, and NTFS5 formats, it also supports the Linux ExtFS2 and ExtFS3 and the BSD Unix UFS1 and UFS2 formats.

The user interface doesn’t rely on fancy graphics and, like the interfaces for the Active@ Undelete and Stellar Phoenix, is modelled on the Windows Explorer standard.

R-Studio opens with a three-pane window; the Program activity log runs in a strip at the bottom, the Device/Disk list occupies the left pane. and the Properties pane, which lists the properties of the selected device, is on the right-hand side. The panes can be resized by dragging on the borders.

On startup the program recognised and clearly identified the floppy drives, hard disks, CD drives, DVD drives and memory cards in the USB card reader connected to our test system.

As with the other Windows Explorer-style programs, to retrieve lost files you first have to select a storage volume from the device tree on the left and then click on the Scan button on the upper menu bar.

A scan of our 38GB test volume took 36 minutes. Once the scan completes, deleted files can be selected for attempted restoration to the designated recovery volume.

There’s an update wizard for R-Studio but this is installed as a separate program and cannot be invoked from within R-Studio.

Although R-Studio may be the most powerful of the six retrieval tools reviewed in our group test, unfortunately it isn’t particularly user friendly. Reading the manual is mandatory with this program.

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
Stellar Phoenix Fat + NTFS 
Retaining control of your data
Broken drives and professional data retrieval labs