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OntrackEasy Recovery Lite [Computer Buyer]
COMPANY: Ontrack	PRICE: £59 inc VAT
RATING:	ISSUE: 196 DATE: Sep 07

Verdict: Looks clever, and at this price it had better be. Lots of features, but it's expensive, limited, and doesn't recover files particularly well.

Ontrack is a specialist in file recovery, and this program is the consumer version of an enterprise software solution that costs £150, so our hopes were high.

The program provides two types of search: a standard search, which looks for everything on a disk, and a deleted file search, which allows you to specify wildcards and say which file formats to look for. You can specify Office documents, HTML



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files, image documents and 'developer documents'. If you're thinking this doesn't sound like a very long list of formats, we can't disagree. EasyRecovery Lite was the only program on test that didn't manage to recover a single PDF document. Despite claiming to handle Office files, it also failed to find our deleted text files and corrupted one of the Excel documents it recovered.

At this point we turned hopefully to the File Repair function, only to discover that it repairs zip files and nothing else. As it happened, EasyRecovery Lite was unable to find any of our deleted zip files, corrupt or otherwise, so we weren't able to test this feature.

To top it all, EasyRecovery Lite only allows you to recover 25 files. If you have more to retrieve, it advises you to buy the full £150 version of the program or hire a 'professional data recovery engineer'. Given that this was already the most expensive software on test, our reaction could most politely be described as unimpressed.

By Karl Wright

SPECIFICATIONS:
Requires Windows 98SE/2000/XP, Pentium processor, 64MB RAM, 150MB disk space