WinUndelete Review

I have been trying out this software for a good period of time. I have been loading just about every kind of file I can find onto different types of media (flash drive, external HD, internal HD, camera, and SD card) and would delete it and try to have it recover. I the different files I chose were as follows, a group .jpgs, a group of .pngs, some PDFs, some word documents some executable files.

At first had what I thought would be a surefire way of making it so it wouldn't be able to recover a picture of one of my dogs. I was going to put the file or a flash drive, delete the file off the flash drive, and then format the flash drive. Lo and behold, after some time for the program to analyze my drive, it was able to recover my photo. I tried the same with word files and PDF's and it still was able to recover them. I also tried it on a spare external hard drive (completely different storage mechanism). It still was able to recover everything, I was amazed.

I was curious and checked out a few of the other freeware file recovery programs out there and it was here that I found the programs few flaws. First was its price, there are many other options out there that do the same thing for free, and (sometimes) its speed. On my netbook, it could sometimes run slowly if I had other programs running. Sometimes (but not every time) when I pitted one freeware alternative (a popular program called Recuvra) against WinUndelete, in a timed race to see who could be the first to recover some pictures, the freeware alternative would with a very narrow lead. I had concluded that maybe this program wasn't worth the money.

At the end of the school year, my daughter called telling me that the photos they had taken before prom weren't on the camera for some reason. I remembered this program, and told her where to find it on our kitchen computer, I was telling her the instructions on how to use it before she started it up, but thanks to the easy to use UI, she was able to do it on her own. In a few minutes she was able to recover most of her photos. The only downside was that they had some pixelation and artifacts in the background, but she was so happy she didn't even care about the photos quality