GetData Recover My Files review

It's inevitable that you'll accidentally delete precious files from the Recyle Bin, or face the horror of losing all the data on your hard disk because of a partitioning error or a system crash.

Fortunately, Recover My Files can restore deleted files even if the hard disk has been formatted or you've lost files through a virus infection. The software supports over 200 file types, including JPG, MP3, DOC, ZIP and MPG, and even obscure files such as saved games and internet favourites.

There's no need to have the software installed before files are lost, as you can install it afterwards. You'll need a working PC or laptop to use it, so if a system disk has been formatted, you must connect that disk to a working PC. Files can be rescued from any type of storage, including USB flash drives, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and memory cards.

The program's main interface offers Fast and Complete searches as well as Fast and Complete Format recovery. The first two are for rescuing a small number of files (a folder of photos, for example), while the other two deal with entire drives.

We formatted a 100GB external USB hard disk and chose the Complete Format Recover option. By default, five common file types are searched for, and the program suggests you don't change these. We selected our formatted disk from the list and had to wait 12 hours for the scanning process to build an index of the files. These were displayed in a long list, along with their size, type and original folder location.

After that, we just had to select the files we wanted to restore (we selected them all) and choose the destination disk to copy them to. It's not possible to restore the files to the same disk, so make sure you have enough spare capacity before starting the process.

Given that Recover My Files rescued every file in our tests, it's well worth the price.