If you delete your valued and irreplaceable files/folders by mistake and you have not backup them with backup & sync software, for instance, the source code for an important project, the photos of you and your girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband, you may need a program which could help you recovering them. There are lots of paid software in this field, such as R-Studio Data Recovery, EasyRecovery DataRecovery, FinalData, they are very good products but will cost you many dollars.

Restoration is a free and effective data recovery application, it’s portable and very little, it does not give you many options to customize, just input the filename or extension and press the Search Deleted Files button, Restoration will scan and list all the files have been deleted. You can select one or multiple files and recover them to a different partition or device, for example, usb flash disk.

Feature List

• The user interface is straightforward and easy to follow.
• It does not write anything to physical sectors.
• It supports the following file systems: NTFS, FAT32, FAT12, FAT16.
• It supports the following devices: Hard disk, ZIP drive, Memory stick drive, DVD-RAM, Smart media.

Restoration is compatible with Windows 7, Windows XP / 2000 / 9X / NT.

After you have extracted the zip archive, right click the file named “Restoration” and select “Run as administrator” from the pop up menu.

Download it from the developer’s website or CNET.

Product Homepage: http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html.

If your hard drive or CD/DVD discs crashed but there are still some valuable documents on it, you sure want to copy those files to another storage drive, but the windows copy doesn’t work: it will stop copying when it encountered bad sectors, nor does the third party copy tools work( such as FastCopy, TeraCopy, Total Copy ). To recover these files, you will need a data recovery program.

Unstoppable Copie is a free handy tool which offers users an opportunity to recover files from damaged CDs/DVDs or hard disk, it does exactly what its name implies – it will not stop the copying progress when it meet bad sectors, it will try its best to recover every byte of a file and put them together, the unrecoverable pieces will be filled with blank bytes.

Unstoppable Copie has a tabbed interface, this makes it very easy to follow, you could specify it to copy undamaged files first, or auto skip damaged files, it also allows you set the number of maximum retries. It has build-in multilanguage support.

Finally, it’s a good idea to backup your files to external hard drive / DVD disk / FTP server / online hard drive regularly with the Backup and Sync software, they could do incremental backup easily for you.

Unstoppable Copie is available as portable and installable software for Windows and Linux. It supports Windows 7, Windows XP / Vista / 2000 / NT / Me / 9X and Linux.

Download it from CNET or the Product Homepage.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery is a free program which could rescue files from local hard drive / usb flash drive / digital cameras memory, if you deleted important files by mistake, you can use this software to get them back with a few steps.

Feature List

• It supports the following file systems: FAT16, FAT32, FAT12, NTFS.
• It allows you save recovered files to network drives.
• It could scan and list partitions even though the boot sector is damaged( does not support NTFS ).
• It can recover the file even if its header entry is bad.
• Supports Multilingual User Interface( MUI ).

However, PC Inspector File Recovery is not user friendly, you may get confused at first, and its speed of scanning lost files is a little slow. But it does the job, so you should give it a try.

PC Inspector File Recovery supports Windows 7, Windows XP / 2000 / 9X / NT.

Download it from CNET or the developer’s website. Click here to visit product homepage..

Blank And Secure is a free, compact, portable and handy program that allows to securely delete specified files and directories perennially, the deleted files can not be recovered with data recovery software.

Features

• Supports drag and drop.
• Overwrites the disk space of selected files and folders with zeros before erasing.
• Allows to overwrite data up to 35 times.
• Allows to cancel the process of deleting with Esc key during the delay period( from 0 seconds to 9 seconds ).
• Supports filling free disk space with null.
• Supports NTFS and FAT file systems.

Blank And Secure works on all Windows platforms including Windows 7 and Windows XP, etc, and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Blank And Secure is a 25.4KB download available from the developer’s website.