Acronis True Image 8.0

True Image 8.0
$49.99
Acronis
www.acronis.com
3.5 CPU’s

True Image is not so much a file rescue program as it is a drive and partition imaging solution that’s designed for backing up and restoring whole systems or drives. The program handles drive imaging in a unique way, and it’s actually a little closer in spirit to programs such as Norton GoBack, although it isn’t quite as seamless in its operation as that program.

Acronis works by letting the user back up partitions to image files, which you can then mount as actual drives or restore over existing partitions. You can create a protected partition called the Acronis Secure Zone that’s hidden from Windows where you can store the image files. These images are either complete copies of a partition or incremental copies of files, such as whatever has changed since the last backup.

In addition, you can also install a Startup Recovery Manager application to restore an image from the protected partition before booting into Windows. This is a handy option if you need to do a restoration to a damaged system. An Explore Image function mounts images stored in the Secure Zone as a separate drive in Windows, and you can copy out files selectively.

The downside of using True Image, of course, is that you need to dedicate a fair amount of space to making a complete backup of your system drive. You can’t create images of directories, only whole drives or partitions, so it’s an all-or-nothing deal. You can set True Image to automatically run a backup cycle at each reboot or log off, but that takes five to 10 minutes on the average. This makes the program best suited for such situations where a whole system needs to be protected rather than individual files.

Executive Software Undelete 5.0

Undelete 5.0
$29.95
Executive Software International
www.executive.com
4.5 CPU’s

Casual users will love Undelete 5.0. It’s the least obtrusive, and in many ways the easiest to use, of the programs I tested.

Undelete works through a methodology that Windows users are already familiar with: the Recycle Bin. Here, it is renamed the Recovery Bin, and it has a slew of functionality for restoring data marked as deleted. The Recovery Bin works roughly the same as the Recycle Bin, but instead it holds files deleted by any mechanism—by another program or from the command line, for example—and you can inspect the contents of deleted files without having to recover them.

Once the program is installed, you can inspect the Recovery Bin by simply clicking it. It doesn’t seem possible to just get a flat list of all the files in the Recovery Bin and quickly sort by name, though. You have to drill through a copy of the folder hierarchy that represents where the file used to be. There is a global search function, however, which partly makes up for this. You can also recover files that were deleted from the Recovery Bin itself up to a point, provided that the files haven’t already been overwritten.

The Undelete CD also has a standalone program called Emergency Undelete that runs from the CD. With it you can recover files without risking further damage to what’s been deleted. The only downside is that Windows has to actually be running; it’s not a recovery CD program that boots on its own, so it isn’t as powerful as it could be.

The most powerful function in the program is only available in the Server Edition of Undelete. With this function you are able to recover files that have been deleted across a network and access Recovery Bins on other computers (provided they’re also running Undelete). Also worth mentioning is that the program can recover older revisions of Microsoft Office documents, even if theyhave been saved on top of each other.

LSoft Technologies Active@ Undelete

Active@ Undelete
$39.95
LSoft Technologies
www.active-undelete.com
4 CPU’s

Active@ Undelete is definitely the most technically advanced of the programs I reviewed. You can scan a drive (fixed or removable), extract detailed information about what files are deleted and still recoverable, preview them before recovery, and even perform byte-level editing on drives.

When you start Active@ Undelete, you are presented with a tree of all the available drives that you can scan for deleted file information. The scanning process doesn’t take long, typically only a few seconds, and when it’s complete it provides the user with a tree-structured list of all files and folders available for recovery. Once you have found the files to restore, you can drag and drop them into a list and recover them selectively or as a batch.

By default the program uses directory information to reconstruct what’s been deleted. An advanced scanning mode searches the drive sector by sector for file recovery information, instead of relying only on directory data. This is useful for recovery operations where the directory might have been damaged, but it takes much longer to run.

Active@ Undelete also lets you create image files from drive partitions and explore them from within the program if you want to perform drive level backups in the manner of Acronis TrueImage. One particularly good feature is the ability to perform undelete operations on drives that were previously part of a RAID array, something that’s not allowed by either other program here. Active@ Undelete’s Network edition even lets you connect to other machines and perform remote operations, provided they’re running the program, too.

The most advanced (and potentially dangerous) feature is probably the program’s Disk Hex Editor, with which you can directly edit the contents of any drive. When you fire this feature up, it rather wisely starts off in read-only mode to keep you from accidentally destroying anything. The editor works on drive images, CDs, and anything else that’s mountable as a drive.

Tips For Using Acronis True Image You can put data on its own partition and image that. Data takes up less room and is more crucial than applications, which you can always reinstall. You can image automatically at shutdown. If you’re interested in using the program’s scheduled imaging feature, set it to image when you’re done for the day. This way you can shut down, let True Image image automatically, and forget about it. If you have a system with a factory restore CD, make a full image of your system to another hard drive and use that for recovery instead, as it’ll probably be faster, and you’ll be able to restore using your own system image.

Tips For Using Undelete 5.0 If you have Microsoft Office installed, Undelete can track file revisions, so you can roll back later versions of a file to an earlier version if needed. This is perfect if you have mistakenly saved over something and you don’t have a proper backup. Undelete lets you configure different bins with different drives, so you can set higher levels of retention on your data drive vs. your system drive. Worried about sensitive data falling into the wrong hands? Enable the Secure Delete feature. Anything flushed from the Recovery Bin is securely destroyed using a Department of Defense-approved erasure algorithm.

Tips For Using Active@ Undelete The program can use more than one MFT (Master File Table) or directory structure on an NTFS drive. Use the backup copy of the MFT if the drive gets blasted and you’re worried about data integrity. If you have proper user permissions on an NTFS drive with encrypted data that you need to recover, you can use Active@ Undelete to decrypt the data to another (non-NTFS) drive. Losing data to both damage and irreversible NTFS encryption is humiliating. Got a guru on the line to help you troubleshoot problems? Active@ Undelete lets you print out a Hardware Diagnostic File, a manifest for the whole system, so you can spend less time describing what’s installed and more time fixing what’s broken.