Diskeeper Undelete 2009 Professional review

Diskeeper Undelete 2009 aims to protect your data against its biggest single threat: user error.

Even the most experienced computer user has accidentally deleted a file they later needed. Windows' Recycle Bin does a basic job of catching files that are manually deleted from a local hard disk, but many slip through the net.

Undelete 2009 replaces your Recycle Bin with a Recovery Bin. This is a more advanced and dynamically sized Recycle Bin. Files can be restored from shared and mapped network drives following standard Windows permission rules. The Explorer-like interface makes it easy to navigate through deleted files, which retain their pre-deletion directory structure.

In addition to manually deleted files, Recovery Bin catches all files removed from your system, including those removed when you uninstall an application or delete file and data histories from applications. Even if you've set an application to purge temporary or working files on a regular basis, they could still be retrievable through the Recovery Bin.

When you save a file in Windows, it creates a new copy and disposes of the old one. By catching these old versions, Undelete works as a version tool for Microsoft Office documents. It's fully integrated with Windows; just right-click on an Office document to restore previous versions. TXT and RTF files are also covered, but files using formats from other office suites (such as OpenOffice's ODT) aren't.

You can even restore files deleted prior to installing Undelete 2009. Successful recovery depends how much time has elapsed since the deletion. The longer you wait, the greater the chance that the sector on your hard disk that the file occupied has been overwritten.

If you have a small network of computers, and create and edit critical files, this may save your business one day, but it's not cheap.