Although Restoration is missing some features found in some other file recovery software we’ve looked at, it also includes some unique features that you might find helpful. Keep reading this review to learn more about how Restoration works and what we liked about it, or see How to Recover Deleted Files for a complete tutorial on recovering files you’ve deleted.
More About Restoration
Restoration is said to run on Windows 95 through Windows XP, but we found that it also works in Windows 7 Files can be recovered from NTFS and FAT formatted drives, which are two of the most common file systems in use today You can sort the results of a scan by the file name, date modified, size, and folder A search tool lets you search through the deleted files to find one of a particular name or file extension Restoration can optionally search for empty files as well From the Others menu, you can choose Delete Completely to apply the Random Data and Write Zero data sanitization methods to permanently delete all the files in the search results
Our Thoughts on Restoration
It’s essential you don’t overwrite the files you’re trying to recovery, which is why it’s important to use a file recovery program from a different hard drive than the one that has the deleted files. Fortunately, Restoration is entirely portable, which means you can run it from a USB device, floppy, or any other device that’s not the one you’re working with. Some file recovery programs, like Wise Data Recovery and Recuva, tell you how recoverable a file is before you undelete it. This is an extremely helpful feature so you’re not restoring files that are too corrupted to be used. Restoration doesn’t have this feature but it does have an option called “Include used clusters by other files,” which, when unselected, will prevent files from showing up in the results if part of it is being used by another file, and thus not 100 percent recoverable. Restoration only lets you recover single files. This means you can’t browse through the search results to restore a whole folder of deleted data. Instead, you can either restore one or multiple files at a time.
