Enplase Multistage Recovery review

When we ran Multistage Recovery for the first time, we were immediately struck by how plain it looks - it really is almost Spartan in its user interface minimalism.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with this - you'd hardly expect a tool for retrieving deleted files from your hard disk to come with an extravaganza of multimedia presentation. A little bit of reassuringly well designed front end would have helped to build confidence in its abilities, though.

As it turned out, recovering our data was nowhere near as straightforward as the simple screen display might have suggested.It took several attempts before the application found all the files we'd accidentally-on-purpose deleted from the test partition. This could give you a worrying time if you'd lost some important files for real and were waiting to find out if they were ever coming back.

In the end, however, Enplase Multistage Recovery did manage to rescue all of our files except two: a WMV video file (the program is honest about the fact that it doesn't support this format) and, less predictably, a text file. Only one of our deleted files, a Word document, became corrupted during the recovery process - all the others opened and ran perfectly after being recovered, even the MP3s.

Multistage Recovery is the cheapest of the three programs on test, so it's not particularly surprising that it lacks some of the posh functions of its competitors. It can neither recover deleted partitions, nor does it have a feature that retrieves deleted emails. Its search function is easy to use but basic, allowing you to specify only where the program should search and the name, or extension, of the file it should look for (as you'd expect, it supports the asterisk as a wildcard).

For the most part, Multistage Recovery did what it claimed it would do - but Recover My Files is better and still not too expensive.