Pandora Recovery – Free Reliable Recovery of Deleted Files of Any Type

How does it work?

When you delete a file on FAT32 or NTFS file system, its content is not erased from disk but only reference to file data in File Allocation Table or Master File Table is marked as deleted. It means that you might be able to recover deleted files, or make it visible for file system again.

Pandora Recovery allows you to find and recover recoverable deleted files from NTFS and FAT-formatted volumes, regardless of their type - you can recover pictures, songs, movies or documents. Pandora Recovery will scan your hard drive and build an index of existing and deleted files and directories (folders) on any logical drive of your computer with supported file format. Once the scanning is complete you have full control over which files to recover and what destination to recover them to. You can BROWSE the hierarchy of existing and deleted files, or you can use SEARCH functionality to find a deleted file if you remember at least one of the following:

- full or partial file name,

- file size,

- file creation date, or

- file last accessed date

On top of that, Pandora Recovery allows you to preview deleted files of certain type (images and text files) without performing recovery. This feature becomes really important if you are forced to recover deleted files to the same drive. Currently you can preview files having several image file types (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, ICO, TIF, TGA, PCX, WBMP, WMF, JP2, J2K, JBG, JPC, PGX, PNM, RAS, CUR) and several text file types (TXT, LOG, INI, BAT, RTF, XML, CSS). Quick Viewer allows you preview file contents as text if it cannot find appropriate viewer for it. To use quick viewer, you can select deleted file and or click the Quick Viewer icon or right click on deleted file and select 'Quick View'. Quick View will then display a preview of deleted file.

Recover Archived, Hidden, Encrypted, Compressed files

Pandora Recovery can recover not only 'regular' files, but also archived, hidden, system, sparse, encrypted and compressed files.

Windows 2000 introduced Encrypting File System (EFS), which supports file encryption. EFS service runs on top of NTFS and encrypts or decrypts files or folders transparently for users and applications. Pandora Recovery does not decipher contents of encrypted files. Instead of that it copies the content of an encrypted file in raw mode just like data back-up applications do.

Encrypted and compressed files will be color-coded once drive indexing has been completed. Names of the encrypted files will be displayed in GREEN, while compressed files will be BLUE.

Recovery success estimate

When a file has been deleted, the disk space occupied by the file can be reused by file system. The file system can reallocate this space for data of newly created files. Once operating system does that the deleted file becomes partially or completely overwritten. There are more chances that an overwritten file is corrupted and cannot be recovered successfully. Overwritten files can still be recovered, but they likely will not be usable.

If clusters once used by a file have been reused by another already deleted files Pandora Recovery will display 0% as 'overwritten' value, which means the clusters are not currently in use. Still, the recovered data is likely to be corrupted.

Pandora Recovery gives you an estimate of recovery success by displaying the percent of clusters reused by operating system. To view the estimate, move the mouse pointer over a file for a second or two until popup tip is displayed. The tip will say "Overwritten: 50%" or "Overwritten: 0%”. The higher the percent, the lower the chance of successful recovery.

Names of files with partially or completely overwritten clusters are displayed in RED.

Recover to Local Hard Drive, Network Drive, or Flash Drive

Pandora Recovery can use local hard drive, remote network drive or flash drive as a recovery destination folder. Pandora Recovery even allows you to recover deleted files on the same drive that the deleted files resided on originally.

IMPORTANT! To increase the success rate of file recovery it is strongly recommended that you recover your deleted file to a secondary hard drive, a network drive, USB Flash drive, or other external media. While recovery to the same drive that the deleted files reside on is physically possible it may lead to partial or complete loss of your deleted content. Non-deleted files will never be put at risk in either circumstance.

If your lost data resides on your C: it is recommended you perform your file recovery by physically removing the C: drive from your computer and attaching it as a slave on another computer and then performing the file recovery using that other computer.

Website: http://www.pandorarecovery.com/