O&O UnErase

Now this is something I rarely write about, but since this software practically saved 30GB of my data - I guess I was bound to at least write something good about it. As some of you may know (if you followed my Twitter), yesterday Vista SP1 wiped off 30GB worth of data from my portable harddrive. Not sure how or why. All I did was delete a single file, then the screen blinked once and the drive became unresponsive. After that only three sub folder remained, and all were empty. Vista threw a hissy fit at me when I attempted to right click on the folder to look at the properties. Anyway I unplugged it and plugged it onto a XP workstation and found that my worse fears were confirmed.

Fortunately I have a version of O&O UnErase installed (can't remember which version it was, but it definitely isn't the latest). Fired it up, and within a couple of mouse clicks it was recovering the missing files, with its file names and folder structures, onto the desktop. Once done all I did was recopy the files back to my portable drive. Very simple and efficient, though the application does seem reserve an awful lot of resource - almost locking up the computer and certainly making it almost unusable during the restore. After that I did a virus scan on the Vista machine, just in case, but it revealed nothing. So I am going to put the blame onto Microsoft's software incompetence.