OnTrack Easy Recovery Professional

OnTrack has a sterling reputation in the data recovery field, and its reasonably-priced OnTrack Easy Recovery Professional software lives up to the vendor's reputation. Despite some minor interface glitches, I was able to recover an impressive number of deleted and otherwise-lost files from my hard drive and USB key. I was especially impressed by OnTrack's speed, which far outclassed the competition when recovering data from a USB key or camera card. Easy Recovery Professional can't perform the near-miracles that super-high-priced data-recovery labs can perform with damaged drives, but it's probably your best choice for recovering lost files on the drives you use every day.

Powerful Recovery, Hidden Speed
Keep in mind that the product name includes the word "Professional," meaning that this is a high-powered tool for people who know what they're doing. If you're reading this review, you'll probably know how to use it, but if your tech-challenged uncle asks for a file-recovery tool, be prepared to do the recovery job for him. By default Easy Recovery Professional insists on making a time-consuming "deep" scan of any drive that you try to recover data from.

Rival packages prominently offer a "quick recovery" option that can't find nearly as many files as the deep-scan option, and, in my tests, never produced any useful results. OnTrack hides its quick-scan option deep in a menu where you're not likely to find it. The total effect seems less quick and convenient than rival products, but you'll probably get better results in the end. The demo version is free; if the demo version shows that the progrma can recover your list files, order an activation code online and convert it to the full version, which is what you'll need to complete the recovery.

Getting Started
When you start up EasyRecovery Professional, it displays a user-friendly wizard interface. You start by choosing the kind of device you want to explore?a hard drive, a "memory device" (typically a USB key), optical media, a mobile device or MP3 player, or a RAID system?though the RAID option only leads to a dialog telling you that you need a different version of the software to use it. After selecting the kind of device, you next choose the drive or disk you want to explore. You can choose a drive that Windows Explorer can't see, provided that Windows displays the drive in its Disk Management utility. (Find this utility from the Start Menu by going to?All Programs > Accessories > Computer Management?and then open Disk Management from Computer Management sidebar.)

Like Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, OnTrack includes a feature that lets you create an image file from a disk that's failing physically, so you can try to recover files by exploring the image file even if the original physical disk fails. This feature is hidden under the Disk Tools menu, so you may not notice it if you're in a panic about lost data, so take a deep breath and explore the interface before using the program. Another useful feature, not found in Stellar Phoenix, is a Disk Refresh feature that in some cases can revive flaky USB sticks and camera storage by rewriting and verifying all the data on the disk. (If you've been using computers since the floppy-drive era, you may remember using similar utilities to revive floppy disks.)

You next select the disk or partition that you want to access from a menu, and then choose whether to use Deleted File Recovery or Formatted Media Recovery, or use a variety of disk-viewing and testing tools. Even if you haven't reformatted the disk you're trying to recover data from, you should probably choose the Formatted Media Recovery option, because it digs deepest, though I got closely similar results from the Deleted File Recovery option.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/iH5NOCPWLL0/0,2817,2407502,00.asp

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