Product Reviews

At first glance, Recover My Files doesn't cut much of a dash, despite its eagerly imperative name, which for some reason reminded us of 1980s dog training guru Barbara Woodhouse. Unlike Enplase Multistage Recovery, its price isn't low enough to be headline-grabbing, nor does the program ride on the coat tails of more expensive enterprise software like Ontrack EasyRecovery Lite. On screen, it looks fairly dull and a little cluttered, although it's quite efficient to use once you get your head around what's going on. What it does have in its favour, as we soon discovered, is that it actually gets the job done.

Recover My Files supports an amazing

ADVERTISEMENT

number of formats, including multimedia formats such as WMV, which immediately makes it more attractive to home users, who may be just as attached to their family videos as their spreadsheets. Perhaps that's why it was the only program on test to find every single one of our deleted files and recover them all, without corrupting any in the process.

The email recovery function, a nice extra, proved to be less impressive in practice: Outlook informed us that our recovered .PST file was invalid, negating the whole recovery exercise, which was annoying. It was also a little frustrating that we had to run several searches before the software found all of our files, but this was a failing shared by all three programs.

On the other hand, Recover My Files made a good job of searching a recently deleted partition (one of its special functions), finding and successfully recovering most of the lost files.

This program is easy to use, has some useful features and, most importantly, scored a high success rate. Considering this, it's reasonably priced. The fact that the advertised email recovery didn't materialise lost it the chance of a Best Buy award, but it's nonetheless the best package on test and earns a Recommended badge.