Losing your family photos, your audio and video files, your spreadsheets and other Office documents either accidentally or due to a virus attack or a system failure is tragic enough to have to deal with cryptic recovery tools full of technicisms when trying to bring them back. Auslogics File Recovery offers you an easy, wizard-based solution to search and retrieve all those files you thought lost forever.
The only technicality you will have to become acquainted with is the algorithms you want the program to use. This will depend on how damaged your lost files are, and your choice will have an impact on the effectiveness of both the recovery process and how securely the program will erase already deleted files permanently from your drives to recover free space. The program offers you various options – you can tell the program to try to restore files that have been partially overwritten with new data, to retrieve plain text files with an irregular file structure, and choose among four different wipe methods, from 1 pass to 35 passes. Everything else is dealt with via the program’s convenient recovery wizard.
The wizard opens as soon as you launch the program, and the first choice you have to make has to do with the drive(s) to scan and the file type you’re looking for. The second step will allow you to specify a modification date range, if you happen to know it. Next is the name(s) of the file(s) you need to recover, and the fourth step will let you add some additional criteria to narrow the scan process further, such as the option to perform a deep (and much slower) scan and the possibility of ignoring empty, temporary, and system files. The scan time will largely depend on the number and the size of the drives the program has to analyze, the type of scan selected, and your PC’s processing speed, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours.
The files found are presented in a different interface. You can browse the list looking for the file in question, use a filter, or search for it by its name. If the file is not too damaged, the Preview panel on the right-hand side will display the contents of the selected file, though, during testing, it only worked with certain images. Here you can select which files you wish to recover. If you want to get rid of the remaining deleted files for good and thus recover the space they are taking, you can use one of the program’s most useful extra tools – the Free Space Wiper. Both this simple utility and the File Shredder will turn deleted files in completely irrecoverable data using the algorithm you selected among the four provided. This changes the focus of the program completely – from trying to recover deleted files no matter what to making sure that nobody can recover the files that you don’t want anymore.
As it happens with most data recovery tools, Auslogics File Recovery’s success will largely depend on how damaged the drive and the files in question are. Severe drive damage or totally overwritten files are hard (if not impossible) to scan, detect, and/or restore. No file recovery tool can do the impossible, so their claims of being capable of bringing back to life all deleted and damaged files shouldn’t be taken to the letter.
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