We have all experienced file loss at one time or another. For me it’s usually an accidental deletion of a directory when I am cleaning up old files from my hard drive. Soft Logica has requested Hacked Gadgets to perform an unbiased paid review of their software package called Handy Recovery. If you are working in a Windows environment chances are you could use Handy Recovery to restore some of your data in the future.

The software downloaded in a few seconds since it is less than 1MB in size. Anyone that does Windows software development knows that an executable of this size is quite impressive. Installing the program was simple, all it took was a few clicks and about 30 seconds. There is extensive help available however I’m not fond of reading documentation, I would rather click around and just kick the tires. Luckily the interface is intuitive using a few large buttons along the top. One area that could be improved is the hover over tips and the help text at the bottom of the application window. These tips and help text often just repeat the label of the command buttons and provides no additional information.

The software was installed on a system with a 120GB hard drive with about 85GB used. After clicking the analyze button the program went through the entire hard drive looking at the structure and checking for files that could be recovered. The entire process took just under six minutes, there was good indication of progress during this process. Once analyzed, a tree structure of the drive is displayed, it is identical to the viewing method used with the Windows file viewer.

Directories that contain files that might be recoverable are indicated with a red plus symbol. Once you find a file that you want to recover simply double click it to display your recovery options. The unregistered version of the software will recover one file per day, I performed one recovery and it worked well. Software registration was done next so that I could test the software a bit more, it registered as expected, quick and painless. It looks like it calls home during the registration process so like other software you may have some additional steps to register without an internet connection.

I performed many more recoveries after the software was registered and they all recovered with ease. All of the deleted files are tagged with a probability of recovery, even the ones that were listed as poor were able to be recovered.

I am impressed by the support that is provided. If you are a registered user you will get two business day email tech support and unregistered users also get support however they have to wait up to five business days. A toll-free USA phone number is provided, I called it from Canada at 8:00 PM central time this evening and got an answering machine that asked me to leave some details so it looks like even Canadians have access to phone support.

Handy Recovery is reasonably priced at $39.00 USD and if you have the last version (2.0) you can upgrade to 3.0 for free.

There is also a file viewer that allows you to view the raw data of the file before it is recovered. If all that wasn’t enough there is also deleted and formated partition recovery options. These functions were not tested since I am using a drive formatted as one single partition.

Overall I found the program to function very well and perform as expected. Personally, I don’t think I would purchase the software before I needed it but if I need to recover a file in the future I now know what I would use.