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I Really Didn’t Mean To Empty That Recycle Bin!


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Handy Recovery by SoftLogica. (Graphic: SoftLogica)

P.C. Smith: One Byte at a Time

Park Forest, IL—(ENEWSPF)— Deleting a file. No big deal.  We all delete files. We have been trained ever since Windows 95 to empty the recycle bin. Or, on the Mac, the trash can. Good house keeping until…

“Darn, I didn’t want to delete THAT!"

Attempting to be helpful one day, I thought I was doing a good thing assisting a PC user who had never emptied her computer’s Recycle Bin.  So I did it for her, only to find out the Recycle Bin is where she was storing items she no longer wanted on her desktop!   "Dooh"

That was a time when I could have used a product like Handy Recovery.

Handy Recovery, by SoftLogica, is one of the most useful and easy to use products that has come across my screen in a  long time. Old "DOS" users may remember the undelete utility that was in the last few versions of DOS.

When a file is deleted on a hard disk drive it is really not "physically" deleted. Most computer operating systems do a ‘logical deletion" of the file.   Sometimes the file system will insert a question mark (?) on the front title of the file to tell the operating system, "These spaces are a deleted file and you may write over them or reuse these spaces to write new data.”

Most times your operating system will just find free, unused, unmarked space because this area is easier to write in.

Handy Recovery will scan your drive and show an explorer type interface with deleted and undeleted files. When possible it also shows the contents of a deleted file, or a preview of a picture you may have deleted.  Handy Recovery also provides an estimate of the probability of a successful recovery of that file. You can recover the file to a different drive or disk. You can even restore the file to the same location it was deleted from.

Handy Recovery also features an option to create disk images for deferred recovery.  You can create an exact image of a logical drive and save it to a special file in another location. It is later possible to open this image and recover files from it. This is great way to backup a system using an external drive.

Handy Recovery took quite some time to scan my whole drive. When it finished it found over 150,000 files and folders both active and deleted on my system. The only test I was not able to do with Handy Recovery was to see if it could recover a file after running a disk defragmentation.

The program will recover files from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards. This means if you can get the card out of your camera into your computer you can recover the files you may have accidentally deleted from your camera!

Softlogica just released version 4.0 that will work on the newly released HFS file system, Vista , as well as NTFS, FAT 12/16/32  file systems.

A 30 trial version can be downloaded at http://www.handyrecovery.com. The cost to for the registered version is $39.00 with volume license pricing available.

The next time you think a priceless file is gone forever, before losing your mind, or your religion, take a look ay Handy Recovery.

 

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Screenshot of Handy Recover at work. (Phogo: SoftLogica) 

 


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