Things By Mike

Recovering lost or deleted files with Handy Recovery

Aug 4, 2007 Reviews

I’ll have to admit I’m a bit of newbie when it comes to file recovery, so the whole process to recover deletes files or ones that have been lost in any other manner is something that needs to be as simple and painless for me as possible. I’ve only attempted file recovery a few times in the past with mixed results.

Today I gave a piece of software called Handy Recovery a try. As I mentioned considering my newbie status when it comes to data and file recovery, I really want something that’s a breeze to understand without a steep learning curve to tackle. The Handy Recovery website assures that their software is “easy-to-use”. Perfect! That sounds like just the thing for me.

Before jumping any further into the review, I thought I’d list the features the Handy Recovery website proclaims their software is capable of.

• NTFS/NTFS 5 + EFS, FAT 12/16/32, HFS/HFS+ file systems support
• In-depth disk scanning for certain file types
• Option to create disk images for deferred recovery
• Preview window to show the content of deleted files
• Shows probability of successful recovery for each file
• Recovers files from deleted and formatted partitions
• File filtering by name, mask, date and size
• CF Card Recovery (compact flash)

So did it work for me?
I have multiple drives in my system, so I decided to give the software a try on the drive I use mainly for my music files and see what I could find.

The first thing I did was select the drive and then let the Handy Recovery software analyze it. The software performed a quick scan of my drive and indeed it did find deleted files.

This first image shows some old instrument samples I’ve used when creating music, which I deleted quite a while ago.

This second image shows a folder of mp3s which were also deleted months ago.

Now what if I want to try and dig deeper?
Handy Recovery allows you to perform an “extended analysis” and set a filter for the types of files you’re looking for. In this example I set my filter for a few different types of media files.

The extended analysis took considerably longer than the first analysis I performed. The wait time was about ten minutes. Considering the software was basically doing a much deeper scan searching only for files I specified, I expected it probably would take much longer.

As you can see it found plenty of files.

Unfortunately the files showed up as unnamed so it could end up being a pretty lengthy process if I were looking for one specific file. I’d have to go through each and everyone of these unnamed files to try and find just what I’m looking for. To make that process a little easier there is a handy preview feature which allows for the ability to either listen to or view a file so the decision can be made to recover the file or not.

One thing I should I also mention about deleted files the software finds is that not all of them are going to be recoverable. It would seem the older a file is, the less chance you’re going to have of recovering it. Handy Recovery has a feature called “probability” that lets you know the odds of file recovery. Files marked as “poor” are probably not going to recover well and in fact I did find this to be the case. Mp3s marked as poor, for example, tended to have incomplete and often incorrect data. Files marked as “good” however seemed to still be in decent enough shape for me to recover. For example files I recently deleted from my recycle bin recovered just fine.

I did not have a compact flash memory card readily available in order to attempt image recovery, however I’m going to assume the process is similar. If you recently deleted images from the card your chances of recovering of them are probably going to be pretty good.

So would I recommend this software?
I would certainly recommend this software if you’re looking for a quick and simple way to recover recently deleted or lost files. If you accidentally deleted something from your recycle bin and then realized you shouldn’t have, you just might be able to get it back using Handy Recovery. Just keep in mind that you may not have as much luck with older files.

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