Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

A couple months back I was experimenting with setting up a dual boot and idiotically overwrote a bunch of files in a Windows partition on my external drive that I didn’t have backed up — uh oh spaghetti-o. A few times I’ve had other bonehead moments and sent files to the recycle bin and then deleted and went, wait, I need that file (that wasn’t backed up), what now?

Fortunately Windows disk recovery tools and utilities exist which can rescue some, most or all deleted files, recover deleted and reformatted disk partitions like Handy Recovery ($39 USD single user license v3.0, v1.0 freeware available). There is a 30 day free trial available, which I’ll be examining in depth shortly.

When I looked around a couple months ago for tools, I found that the quality of these utilities varied considerably, so I was curious how Handy Recovery would measure up against the tool I purchased back then (Restorer2000 Pro $49.99). There are a bunch of freeware disk recovery tools out there too, but none that I tried were able to successfully identify and recover the amount of files from a reformatted and partitioned drive as the commercial tools. I don’t mind buying software, so I reached for the plastic and threw down.

Fast forward a couple months to today.

I didn’t check or even know about out Handy Recovery (HR) at the time, there were way too many out there to wade through, but from looking over the HR feature list I wish I had tried them out. Among the search keywords I never thought of “handy” which would have brought me right to their website and product. Even if you forget about this review (perish the thought), just remember the word ‘handy’ along with disk recovery and you’ll be able to find the official Handy Recovery site. I hope nobody reading this ever loses or deletes important data that isn’t backed up, but if you do someday (and I’m sure everybody reading this has done or will do it at some time or another), the price for a quality grade recovery tool is well worth it.

Is Handy Recovery a quality recovery tool? That’s what I wanted to find out. During this review I got the chance to do something I’ve never done before: intentionally delete data to try and see how handy HR really performed. Check it out, I’m going all mad scientist on our hard disk. Hehehehe.

System requirements and download
I downloaded the same 30 day trial Handy Recovery you can get here. Windows: 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP. Note: Handy Recovery successfully passed the Designed for Windows XP certification by Microsoft®. File systems supported: FAT12/16/32 or NTFS/NTFS 5. Per the official website:

During this time you will be able to try all its features and decide if you really like our product and want to buy it. The evaluation version can recover 1 file per day.

The download is available in a compact 876k exe or optional RAR file. I chose the exe.

Beneath the trial download is a message from the CEO, Sergey Petrov that Handy Recovery v1.0 is available as freeware: “…the lite unrestricted version stays available online for download. We hope that you will find Handy Recovery really handy for your day-to-day activities.” Although I don’t pull bonehead oops delete moments once per day, I downloaded this version too. It’s somewhat rare seeing legacy versions being offered as freeware. Suggestion: would be nice to see some sort of feature comparison chart so prospective customers could get a taste with the freeware legacy version and then see all the advantages they’d receive by upgrading to v3.0.

v3.0 Installation
During the installation you’re shown what’s new in version 3.0:

- In-depth disk scanning for certain file types;
- Analysis of lost MFT records (NTFS);
- Recovery of EFS-protected files (NTFS);
- Sector view of disk content;
- Support for compressed disk images;
- Option to save recovery session;
- File filtering by name, mask, date and size.

And also what the main features of Handy Recovery include:

- FAT12/16/32, NTFS and NTFS 5 + EFS file systems support.
- In-depth disk scanning for certain file types.
- Option to create disk images for deferred recovery.
- Shows probability of successful recovery for each file.
- Recovers files from deleted and formatted partitions.
- File filtering by name, mask, date and size.

By default HR installs into:
PRIMARY DRIVE:\Program Files\Soft Logica\Handy Recovery

You can browse and change the default install location if you wish. It doesn’t put anything in the systray by default or liberate itself into your startup files. It does offer a desktop icon, default checked. This is what I’d call a very non-invasive installation. At the end of the installation, also default checked, are read the readme file and launch Handy Recovery v3.0. I left both checked and proceeded. You can safely skip the readme file because it’s basically identical to what I blockquoted above and is already included and shown in the text box during installation.

Licensing and transfer, not
I scanned through the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) and learned that: “This license is not transferable to any other system, or to another organization or individual” which sucks. I wonder how many people are going to read so they can honor this type of agreement. If I paid roughly 40 bones for something I should be able to transfer the license and software to somebody else and recoup some of my investment. Every commericial program I’ve ever created and sold has allowed one time license transfer, even though I fully realize some people will sell/transfer it and still keep it on their systems. All we’ve required is that existing customers tell us who they transferred their license to so we can update our records and provide the support to the new customer. I wish all software licenses worked this way.

As software developers we have to trust customers to do the right thing instead of handcuffing them like the RIAA has tried to do with music and the MPAA with film. Most people assume they buy something that they can conduct a one time sale to somebody else. I’m not talking about opening up and encouraging piracy here, I’m talking a one time only transfer from buyer to seller. Would be nice to see SoftLogica LLC which makes Handy Recovery and other companies who put similar information in their EULA change this provision. What do you think?

It’s not a dealbreaker for me when I see this in the EULA, but it’s definitely a disappointment.

Running for the first time
A tip window loads centered at startup. I like these tip windows and often will scroll through reading several tips before closing and using a program for the first time. You can uncheck a box and never see these tips at startup again. I noticed an interesting feature of HR right away:

The ability to recover files while the analysis is taking place is something I don’t recall seeing in other recovery software I tried before. I’m sure this feature is in some of the products out there, but I do clearly remember the recovery process taking a long time — hours instead of minutes — especially for large hard drives, so this is a very handy feature, no pun intended.

Most recovery programs recommend recovering to a different drive because you might overwrite the files you are trying to recover. This is another good reason to use external drives for saving important data and backing up important files regularly. I noticed a pitch in the tips window for Soft Logica’s backup solution. Smart marketing.

Recycle bin test #1
My first act of self(file)-destruction was to recover a deleted screenshot pictured below (click to enlarge) which is named handy-recover-1.png. It is the full-size souce file of the screenshot pictured at the top of this post to the right. It’s been deleted since I started writing this review and I’ve been saving other files on the same primary drive.

In the dropdown menu I chose my primary drive (J:) from the dropdown menu. Note how all your NFST and FAT drives are displayed:

Next, I clicked the analyze button and waited. Where would the file appear? I stopped the process after a minute and saw a hyperlink for an extended analysis that lets you choose what deleted file types to scan:

Clicking the read more link, I learned:

If you have analyzed the disk where your deleted files were located (either an existing logical drive or a lost partition) and still cannot find your files in the folder where they were stored, this may be because the corresponding file records have been overwritten. In this case it is impossible to recover file path and name, however there is still a chance that the content of the file is still saved on the disk and has not been overwritten at least partially.

In other words, this will label lost files by extension like image_1.jpg, image_2.jpg, but unfortunately this wouldn’t help for specifically locating .PNG files since this wasn’t an option (pictured to the right). The only image options were: JPG, GIF, PSD, DXF, DXG, BMP, Corel draw image and TIFF. Why is PNG so often treated as a second class citizen to GIF? Argh. The good news is you can filter by anything so one can still filter by .PNG after the analysis is complete.

The file I removed from the recycle bin should have been recoverable fairly easily because it was a recently deleted file. I wish there was an easy button in HR to click to see files removed from the recycle bin. A Recycle Bin oops button should be in every one of these disk recovery tools for Windows users. That’s something I might use more regularly to pull something back that I deleted too soon. Suggestion: add this feature in a future version.

Started the analysis process at 10:36am PST. Finished: 10:38. Very impressive. I clicked on the Filter button at the top and did a search for .PNG. The file was nowhere in sight. I tried using the “Find” file and put in the full filename. Result? Not found. Bummer.

Time to try the extended analysis process mentioned above. Maybe just the name of the file was lost but the file could still be recovered? This process took much, much longer. After 15 minutes and counting and I gave up. I might have been willing to wait an hour or more for a full analysis to find a very important file I just deleted, but not a test file.

Recycle bin test #2
Next I tried deleting every screenshot file in this review so far, a total of 12 files, if you count the larger size you need to click to see. First they went to the recycle bin and then the bin was emptied. I waited 10 minutes before running the analysis again. I deleted, created and moved some files around during this time. Surely I’d be able to find at least one of these files, right?

This time, same result. WTF? I just deleted the files 10 minutes ago. I tried the advanced filter feature, asking it to filter and show me all the JPG files created in the last day:

No results. I tried the last two days. Nothing. No way. What was I doing wrong here?

Deleted file from July 2006 restored
Conversely, HR was successfully able to locate some music files I deleted clear back in July 2006. I would have thought those files to be long gone by now. It listed the probability of restoring those files as “average.” Since I could only restore one of those files with the trial, I chose one listed as “good” and it successfully restored into J:\Recovered Files.

I listened to the MP3 and it played flawlessly.

Putting Handy Recovery to a more brutal test
I decided to switch gears and put HR to the ultimate test with that same external drive which I needed to recover a couple months back. But wait, another wrinkle: I have since repartitioned the drive for use with our Mac (FAT32) and a new NTFS partition. I use the FAT32 partition as the primary iTunes music folder drive on the Mac. I was curious how many of the original files from a couple months ago I might be able to recover, if any. I’ve been using this drive regularly for over two months. I seriously doubted there would be much left of the original data, but this seemed like a good hardcore test of HR ability to recover believed to be lost files. Also it would give me an idea of how long a scan on a 250GB hard drive (USB connection) would take.

I used the searching lost partitions function which took a little more than an hour to complete. It was able to find numerous partitions and files. To my surprise some of those files were still in tact. I would have thought all of those files were gone by now.

Customer Sales and Support
After reviewing Handy Recovery, I wondered what about Windows Vista that comes out in a couple months? Will HR be compatible with Vista? I can’t see many people planning to upgrade wanting to buy this program if it isn’t compatible with Vista.

At the bottom of the homepage there is a toll free number for US residents only: 1-888-364-6797, the main number is +7 (383) 330-6149. Being a Saturday morning that I wrote this review, I decided to dial them up and ask. Result? Answering machine. I didn’t see any posted office hours which would be something they could add to improve. Businesses should have posted business hours, preferably clearly on the home page for the world at large to see. Skype or live help via the web are nice bonuses, neither of which Soft Logica appears to offer.

Decided to email and ask from an email address that wouldn’t immediately identify this domain, which means I asked my wife to email them. Figured we might get a more realistic prospective customer time response that way. I’ll update this post to answer how long this took, but I suspect my cover will be blown shortly after I publish this post. Maybe somebody in the know at Soft Logica will hit the comments area below to answer this question proving that blogs increasingly generate faster responses than email. Once it’s out in public the clock is ticking for all to see. People can sit on a support email forever. Not saying that Soft Logica does that, but we’ll see.

Summary
I like the layout and design of Handy Recovery v3.0 much better than Restorer2000 Pro. The Handy Recovery UI is clean, perhaps unspectacular, but functional, faster (important) and has a few nice features particularly the feature which tells you how likely you will be to restore the file (poor, average, very good, etc).

I would likely have moved on after it failed my two rudimentary Recycle Bin recent file tests and searched for something that would be better suited for this type of task. However, I was pleasantly surprised that HR found and successfully recovered a deleted music file from July of this year on my primary drive that gets used frequently.

Handy Recovery seems more suited to finding older deleted files and directories than newer ones. I didn’t buy a license to HR because I have no need to recover old files at the moment but I agreed to write this review because I’m very familiar with the process — and panic — of recovering important files. I’m not sure when/where the whole “really handy for your day-to-day activities” part that the CEO mentions plays out unless there are folks out there with a daily need to recover older files.

I should note that when I ran Restorer2000 Pro with similar tests, it took a lot longer to analyze and couldn’t find the files I deleted today either. Think about Windows users deleting files and going “oops!” A recovery tool without an undelete for the Recycle Bin seems like a huge oversight to me. For both products. I’d give the product I already paid for and used a worse grade than Handy Recovery v3.0. If I could go back in time I’d have bought HR instead because I like the menus and layout better. Functionality wise, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between the two.

Would I buy HR to replace the program I already have? Maybe next time, assuming there is a next time, but hopefully I don’t have the need for this type of software any time soon. I think my backup strategy is more improved than it was a couple months ago.

Also, if your hard drive has been damaged, you might consider a tool like HR to possibly be able to recover some of the partitions before contacting one of those disaster recovery sites which will take apart the drive if necessary to reconstruct. Most likely you’ll need to pay a lot more to those services than you would by buying something like HR and trying that first.

Since I didn’t have a trashed hard drive around to test this out, I bumped the grade up a little bit for HR because I believe it would do well in that department. That’s just a guess, though, and I welcome anybody with a trashed drive to download the software and use the comments to share your real world experience below. Add to the review and conversation.

It certainly doesn’t hurt anything to download the trial and run the analysis. At the very least, HR is worth adding to the list of try this first before dropping hundreds or [gasp] thousands of dollars on forensic hard drive recovery professionals — some of which are probably using software like this first (and not disclosing this to customers) and thus bilking unsuspecting users. Would you believe that before buying the HR competitor software a couple months ago, I called one of these services you see advertised online and they quoted me $3,000 USD to recover my data? Um, no thanks.

All this detailed information to determine whether or not Handy Recover v3.0 is all that handy? For older files and stupid reformat/repartition mistakes where you don’t have a backup, yes, but for something you just deleted? Pass. Grade: C-

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