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File Scavenger

File undelete utilities have been around for the PC as long as I can remember. If I recall correctly there was an undelete utility included with the first release of the Norton Utilities for DOS 1.x.

No question that I need something to protect myself from myself. Windows 9x certainly improved things with the recycle bin but I still manage to hose myself every now and then.

So I still look for a good file undelete utility and I was very impressed with File Scavenger and how well it worked on NTFS. Certainly given the way Windows writes new data to disk your odds of reclaiming a file are enhanced if you try and recover it immediately, but on some of my less frequently used drives it managed to recover a file I had deleted months ago. The interface is clean and simple to use:

Please click on the image to enlarge it.

Then I got into the innards of File Scavenger and the brilliance of the program whacked me upside the head; yes, it can undelete files, but it really shines by recovering, get this, reformatted volumes, corrupted disk partitions and even broken RAID volumes.

Despite the impressive testimonials on the vendors web site I was somewhat skeptical so I fdisked away a partition on my test machine. Sure enough, bang, FS brought it back. I formatted it. FS brought it back. I even went in with a disk editor, changed a bunch of stuff at ramdom in the partition table and, yes, FS brought it back to life. I don't have a RAID to test it on here at micro acres, but given the performance in the other tests I'd be doggone surprised if it didn't recover anything short of whacking the drive with a hammer....a bunch of times.

And it's not only the fact that it can do it but how easy it is to do it. Once a partition is gone you have two recovery options. If the partition can be redefined at the same spot and size you can use the Exhaustive Search feature to recover files and folders and you should be able to recover everything.

If the partition is lost but you do not know where it was FS can handle that as well. For example you have partitions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Then 2 and 3 are lost and you don't know the size of 2 and thus you don't know where 3 starts. Use the Defunct Volume Search function which will use the contents of the disk to determine the starting sector and size of a lost partition. Yeow!

I hope I never need it, but an ounce of prevention and all that, its part of my toolbox and won't be going anywhere. If you have critical operations and a reformat, rebuild and restore just isn't a reasonable solution from a time standpoint I'd highly recommend you consider having this guy handy because you never know... -- Don Watkins

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