Don’t wait until you have lost files to install a file recovery utility, it may then be too late. Get one now and keep it ready. MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free V8 may be all you need.
Power Data Recovery is able to recover lost files from a wide range of disks and devices, such as hard disk drives, flash drives, memory cards, digital cameras and so on. If it can be plugged into the computer then this utility can probably recover data from it.
The free version of the program enables up to 1 GB of files to be recovered. After that you must upgrade to one of the paid versions, such as Personal Standard ($69), Deluxe ($89) or Ultimate ($129). There are business editions too.
It is hard to test file recover software in a real-world situation and a corrupt disk with lost files doesn’t happen very often. As a quick and simple test, an old USB thumb drive that was not showing up in Windows Explorer had its partition deleted, and then created and formatted. Files were added and then deleted, and the Recycle Bin was emptied too. The USB thumb drive looked empty.
Power Data Recovery was then run and the startup screen enables you to choose any of the internal and external drives and partitions attached to the computer. It then scans the storage and attempts to find deleted files and build a list of them. The time taken for this depends on the speed of the storage device and its size. Internal SSDs are fast but external USB 2 drives are slow for example.
Find your files
The biggest problem with file recovery software, and this tool is no exception, is that they find too much. The thumb drive I was using was years old and had been used a lot, formatted, reformatted, used on a PC and Mac, deleted and so on.
It looked like Power Data Recover found every file ever written to it! It sounds great and in a way it is, but trying to find the specific file that was accidentally deleted is not easy when there are dozens or even hundreds of files, especially when the filenames are not preserved.
This difficulty is not specific to this program and all file recovery tools have this problem. The only solution is to spend time going through all the files found looking for the one you want. Power Data Recovery has some features to help and it has a Preview facility that shows text, hex and images. Being able to view documents and photos before recovering them is very useful.
Select RAW Files in the files found list and the deleted files found are organised into categories like JPEG Camera Files, Adobe PDF files, Zip Files and so on. There is a useful Type tab that also organises files into categories like Document, Archive, Audio & Video, Graphics & Pictures, and so on.
If you know the type of file that was lost, the category can be selected to view all the files. Then if you know roughly when the file was created or last modified, you can then narrow the search to a smaller number of deleted files. File recovery tools all take time and effort.
After locating one or more lost files, they can be selected using checkboxes and then saved to another disk.
Conclusion
Finding and recovering deleted files is a slow and tedious process of sifting through lots of potential files and there is no way around this. MiniTool Power Data Recovery did as good a job as any similar utility I have tried and it found what looked like every file ever deleted.
It looks good and the interface is well designed to keep it as simple as possible.
This is an excellent utility that you should keep on the disk drive just for the odd occasion where you accidentally delete a file and it is not in the Recycle Bin.
Software: Power Data Recovery
Price: Free to recover 1 GB of files
By: MiniTool Software
Size: 17 MB (download)
Windows: 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP
Verdict: A useful recovery tool to have on your drive, just in case.
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