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Handy Recovery Reviewed. Verdict: If Only It Actually Recovered

14th Nov 2006, 10:59 GMT

By David Ponce I am being financially compensated for the time I took to review this product. The opinions expressed are my own. As useful as data recovery programs are, they’re also about as bland as cold porridge. But heck, they’re utility programs, so it’s technically not their fault. Handy Recovery is one such piece of software, and is no more exciting than the aforementioned porridge, though I’d be willing to get over that fact and embrace it if only it did one thing: work. Between a rather uninspiring interface, hit-and-miss deleted-file detection and Picasso-esque image file recovery, Handy Recovery seems anything but handy to this reviewer. For all the details and some pictures of “evidence”, read the full article. On paper, the program sounds pretty good. It’ll recover files from any partition, even formatted or deleted ones and supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives including FAT12/16/32, NTFS and NTFS 5. Once you start the program, and scan your hard drive, it’ll give you a file structure tree, with little red crosses indicating where your deleted files once lived. Of course, this isn’t clear from the start and needs to be inferred. When you finally navigate to the files in question, the program will tell you the probability that the file can be recovered successfully. Sounds peachy, no? Well, I decided to put it to the test. How? By deleting some files of course. I had some files on a smartphone that had just been wiped. I figured I’d try it out there at first. It scanned the removable drive, found all the deleted pictures and I selected one for recovery. The program estimated my chances to recover the file as “Average”. Well, average turns out to mean the following picture. Because it’s an image file, you can immediately see that the recovery effort failed. The program however doesn’t tell you this, and if this was an executable instead, well, there’d be no way to find out until you try to run it. At this point, I’m already not too impressed. But it gets worse. The two normal ways to get rid of data area as follows: send to the trash can, then empty trash can. Or, click on file and press Shift + Delete, which bypasses the trash can altogether. Sure, there are other ways, like formatting the drive, but hell, I only have so much time and I’m not about to format a drive to test a product. It already failed the first test; let’s see this one. After I deleted two more pictures using each method, I scanned the hard drive again. And then I went back to the folder where they used to be, fully expecting to see the files there, with a red cross on them, ready to be recovered. Well, no: they weren’t there. At all. Strange, I thought. So, I did a little research, on Google of all places, and finally discovered that files that transit through the recycle bin get renamed and put in the folder called “Recycler”. Ah. What? Sure, that was obvious. And yes, the picture was there, theoretically recoverable. But the file that bypassed the recycle bin altogether… well, that one simply vanished into ether. I tried the “Shift + Delete + Re-Scan” process three times, and all I accomplished was the loss of three files. I gave up on that and tried to recover the file in the “Recycler” folder. At that point I’m told that the shareware version I’m using only supports one recovery per day. “Fair enough I say, let me try tomorrow.” Next day, I try again, and the recovery seems to work. Except this time is simply didn’t. At all. The JPEG image became an empty, non-displayable file. Useless. Lord, I’ve wasted enough time. If the shareware won’t even work, why would I shell out the $40 for the full version? I have never tried a file recovery program before, so I don’t know if there are any good ones out there. All I can say is my experience with Handy Recovery was disappointing. It’s too bad. [Handy Recovery] P.S. By the way, I do use a Windows PC. It just looks like a Mac because I have a very nice skin on it. I’ll tell you about it one day. Paid, Review, Software

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