No matter how careful we are, there are times when we delete some file, only to find that we need it later. For File Recovery purpose, I usually prefer some paid programs as they seem to perform the job well, but there are some free ones that can do just as well and one of them is Pandora Recovery, small in size but useful.

It can recover files on the drive formatted by NTFS and FAT 32 file system. It won’t work for USB drives or memory cards but since it is free there is no need to complain. Normally when we delete a file, it isn’t actually deleted. All the clusters of the data are present and are marked for re use. As long as they have not been over written, Pandora Recovery can get the file intact, it might even work in some cases where the data has been partially over written depending on the file types.

It use is simple, just run the program and a tutorial will guide you. It will display a list of drives which it can support and you can recover data from that drives. It functions by scanning the hard drive and building an index of existing files and deleted file markers. If it detects that some of the clusters have been overwritten, it displays the filename in red, Pointing the mouse at the filename for a tooltip that reveals how bad the damage is. In the file-browsing mode, as in Windows Explorer, a blue filename represents a compressed file and a green filename means the file has been encrypted using the Encrypting File System. PR can recover compressed or encrypted files as long as none of their data clusters have been overwritten, and as long as any encrypted files belong to the logged-in user. You can even search for specific deleted files and preview it.

It is better to save the recovered data to another drive, not the one from which data is being recovered. The program will warn you to do that. I installed it on my machine and tried to recover all the files that were not over written. It worked pretty fast but it consumed too much CPU space, but was able to recover most of the files, some which I have deleted months ago. There is also a portable version of the program which costs $40 and is useful if you want some very advanced features. For basic use, the free version is enough to get the job done. Which software do you use to recover deleted files ?

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