The following is a paid review. However, it completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid.

The folks over at HandyRecovery.com sent me a copy of their software “Handy Recovery 4.0″ to play with and review.
I will begin by talking about what it is. Handy Recovery is data recovery software designed to restore files that have been accidentally deleted or where damaged by virus attacks, software faults or from deleted/formatted partitions.

It works under 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (has earned the certified for Vista logo). It supports all Windows file systems and hard/floppy drives and unlike much of the recovery software out there, it can recover from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Multimedia and SD Cards. It can also recover from compressed and encrypted files on NTFS drives.

Now, onto my review of the software.

Handy Recovery has a Explorer like interface with the folder list down the left hand side and the files down the right hand side. Its easy to use because everything behaves very Windows-esque. You have some icons up the top, the [+] buttons expand the folder tree and if you right click on a file there you get some more options.

I tested this application by scanning one of my drives (a 20gig partition) which is working fine and took 23 seconds to scan. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular during this scan, here are the results:

It shows the folder tree and the files on the drive. Each folder with a red plus on it means that there is deleted file that is recoverable inside that folder. When I navigate down into these folders, it shows me which one is recoverable and its probability of a successful restoration. All the folders without the red plus are my normal, working files and folders.

What I really like about this application is that it manages to keep the original folder structure and names unlike many other recovery applications. However, sometimes the folder structure isn’t recoverable so it placed in folders below the directory tree on the left hand side.

Like any good commercial recovery software, it has the ability to recover information of lost partitions. Just set the data ranges you want to search and the file system it is, and press Start.

A certain feature that is done really well in Handy Recovery is the ability to search for certain types of files. Sure, other recovery software allows you to set wildcards like *.jpg, but this goes a little beyond that. It allows you to search for all types of images or all types of mail files and more. This is especially handy if you don’t know what extension a certain program uses. Here is a screenshot of that feature.

One last feature I will talk about that I don’t think I have seen in any other recovery software is the ability to preview a file before you recover it. If its an image it will display the image. If its text based it will show you the text. If its something it doesn’t know, it will usually try text based.
As you can imagine, this would be especially useful if you were trying to recover a specific picture off a camera memory card since the file names are always non-descriptive (eg. IMG00054.JPG).

I tried my luck with some old 3.5 inch floppies which have since become corrupted. When I try to open them in Windows Explorer, I either get the error message “Please insert disk into drive A:” or “This disk is not formatted”. If I try and open them under Handy Recovery it can see the files and recover most of them.
While working with the floppy disks I hit the only gripe that I have with this software, it hung a few times while trying to read some of the corrupted floppies. Most disks were fine, but there were just a few bad ones it couldn’t deal with. However, it could list what files were on those bad disks which was interesting.

This software comes as a trial which allows you to recover 1 file per day for 30 days, beyond that it costs $49 USD for the full version. For a commercial piece of software with the capabilities and easy-to-use interface that Handy Recovery has, its not a bad deal at all.

Pros:

• Can read camera memory cards
• Works 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista
• Great interface
• Powerful capabilities

Cons:

• The application hung a few times while trying to read corrupted 3.5 inch floppy disks

You can download the trial version at: http://www.HandyRecovery.com