FreeUndelete – free file recovery

Came across an interesting and free (for private use) utility for recovering deleted data called FreeUndelete. It is being developed by Recoveronix, which, according to the official website, has among its customer’s such American giants as AT&T, Intel, Cisco Systems, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank and many others. The company is a Microsoft partner and specializes in data recovery utilities.

Externally, FreeUndelete looks very simple and without much redundancy, even in terms of graphics. It’s a bit confusing to use, though. First of all, you should specify a folder where all recovered files and folders will be placed. The standard settings are quite inconvenient because all recovered items are placed in the root folder on the C drive. Specify the folder in the “Undelete selected files to” field at the very bottom of the FreeUndelete window.

After that, you can start scanning. To do this, select a disk and press the Scan button. FreeUndelete will run for a while and then show the list of folders and files available on the disk.

Using file and folder masks, you need to set the parameters for displaying the list to display, which will shorten the list. Although you can leave everything as is. The names of deleted folders begin with $$. We enter such a folder and see the deleted data. Check that the record status is good (Good), select the files and press Undelete.

It’s done, all files are placed in the specified folder.

Now by the capabilities of FreeUndelete. The program supports file systems: NTFS 1.0, NTFS 2.0, FAT32, FAT16. Works in Windows XP, 2000, NT 4 (SP2 and above), Windows 2003 Server and Windows Vista operating systems. Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Me operating systems are not supported.

The only drawback, in my opinion, is that the program of this class has an installation. In a critical situation, installing the program can damage already deleted files by overwriting them. Therefore, I would recommend that you install such a program in advance, so that at the right moment you just run it and restore the deleted data.