I always used to blame people who weren’t paying attention when handling files. I kept asking them: How can you be so stupid to delete your personal documents or image files? When I taught my mother to use the computer I told her that ‘Shift+Delete’ is the total extinction of files, with no possible way of going back. I myself actually believed that for a while.
Then I discovered the file and data recovery software. ‘What a great technology”, I said! Just until I had to recover my first accidentally deleted video files. The result: a total mess; all my recovered videos were unplayable, and the ones that I could play were fragmented, with altered sound and misplaced frames. However, there were cases when I managed to recover my lost files.
Handy Recovery is one of those tools that can help you recover files deleted from your hard disks. This product is developed by a Russian company called SoftLogica and can be purchased for only 49$ (single user license). I played a bit with this tool and these are my findings:
Good Things
There are many good things about this product. The best is its effectiveness in recovering your data. If the analysis done by Handy Recovery finds your lost files and the probability of recovery is not shown as poor, then you have a very good chance of recovering them. However, there are times when your files are not found by their original name. So, if you see that it found a file with a weird name but with the same size, file type and in the same location, it means that that file is actually the one you lost/deleted.
Except the standard features for data recovery, Handy Recovery allows you also to create images of your partitions to another drive. By using this feature you can easily backup your important files to an external hard disk and recover them with ease when needed.
Another strong part of this tool is the available help & documentation. In the Help section you can find useful tutorials that show you step-by-step what to do in order to find and recover your lost files.
Things that could be improved
The biggest improvement area for this tool is the general ease of use. This tool has a strange mixture of professional and amateur settings and actions. What can make Handy Recovery more or less accessible for you is the way you get familiar or not with its interface and style of work. The more time you spend using this program, the easier it will be for you to work with it.
Another thing that can be improved is the filtering. Once you have filtered the results of the disk analysis, when clicking on the ‘Filter’ button again, it disables the filter instead of giving you the possibility to further edit the filter. After using Handy Recovery for a while, this became quite annoying. Also, it would have been nice to have some pre-configured filters. For example, filters which show only the found pictures, music or video files. Many users are not that technical and do not know or remember the extension of the files they lost. For them having such filters can be very useful.
Conclusion
Handy Recovery is a good product which does a good job of recovering your data. If future updates improve it’s small shortcomings, this product has the potential to be one of the best data recovery solutions.
However, do not expect it to do wonders. If your data is seriously damaged there’s a good chance you might not recover it. After all, the best solution is still you taking care of your data and not a file recovery tool. And just for your mental comfort and for a safe data insurance strategy, provide yourself with a good tool that you can always have at hand. Handy Recovery is sure worth a try.