Recover deleted files
Envision yourself on a Friday afternoon, hurrying to finish a project so that you can beat the traffic home. Halfway through saving a large file, you receive a Disk Full error message. You frantically delete files from your hard disk and empty the Recycle Bin to make room. You finish saving the file, turn off your system, and rush out the door.
On Monday, your boss asks when you'll have the financial report ready. Suddenly you realize that you deleted the financial report in your moment of temporary insanity the previous Friday.
You search your system for the file. You look in the Recycle Bin, but you know it's empty. You get a sinking feeling as you imagine your boss' reaction. You wish you had a way to undelete files that you've accidentally deleted.
This month I evaluate four products that do the seemingly impossible—restore deleted files, even after you've emptied Windows NT's last hope, the Recycle Bin. None of these products requires hexadecimal debugging expertise or other specialized knowledge. Each product takes a different approach to undeleting files. Two of the products provide after-the-fact undelete features, and two of the products provide numerous layers of undelete protection, including a modified Recycle Bin. Two of the products use wizards to guide you through the undelete process, whereas the other two products use a bare-bones approach that takes a while to get used to. Three of the products let you undelete files before you install the full product. This feature is important because when you undelete a file from a drive, the sectors the file was using still contain information concerning the file. However, the system considers this space as free space and lets you overwrite it when you install the undelete program. Unless you have an emergency undelete option, you might overwrite the files you're trying to undelete simply by installing the undelete utility.
You might not need an undelete utility. However, you'll be glad this functionality is available if you ever need to use it. Like the old saying goes, "It's better to have something and not need it than to need something and not have it."
The Test Environment
For my tests, I used a Pentium 166MHz MMX single-processor system with 64MB of RAM, a 4.1GB hard disk, and a 20X CD-ROM drive, with Service Pack 3 (SP3) installed. In addition, I installed ArtiSoft's ConfigSafe for Windows NT, which let me take a snapshot of the system's original configuration. After I completed each product's review I uninstalled the program and used ConfigSafe to restore the system's original configuration. Thus, I tested all four products with the same configuration.
The Tests
I created two text files in WordPad and saved them in the system root directory as text explorer delete.txt and text dos prompt delete.txt. I used NT Explorer to delete the first file, and a command prompt to delete the second file. Next, I emptied the Recycle Bin and rebooted the system before I tested each product. I used each product's default settings to try to recover both files. If a product couldn't restore the files via its default settings, I configured the program until it could restore the files, and I reran the test.
Evaluating the Options
I reviewed each product's ability to restore files after you delete them from the command prompt, in NT Explorer, or via application uninstall procedures (including after you empty the Recycle Bin). I examined whether you can use each product's default settings or whether you need to perform additional configuration to restore files and directories. I determined whether each product could undelete files before you installed the entire product and whether you could undelete files remotely or across a network. I looked for helpful features such as a modified Recycle Bin, which enhances NT's Recycle Bin. Finally, I evaluated each product's installation, user interface (UI), documentation, technical support, and ease of use. Table 1, page 158, summarizes my analysis.
Lodestone Research conducted usability tests on the products. For information about these tests, see the sidebar "Usability Testing," page 162.