Hard drive failure is rare, but if it happens to you and you do not have a recent backup to hand you could lose all of your personal documents. Similarly, when partitioning your hard drive, there is the potential for the partition structures to be corrupted which can rendere valuable data inaccessible - this is where O&O DiskRecovery can help. The program will scan every sector of your hard drive and piece together any data that can be retrieved - the same process can be used to recover data from memory cards and USB drives.

The entire process is wizard-based which makes it very easy to recover data. With support for over 350 file formats, DiskRecovery stands a better chance than many other data recovery tools of recognising data that needs to be restored. When recovering data, it is important not to use the drive from which file need to be recovered - this runs the risk of overwriting data and making it useless. As such, it is possible to run the program from a removable drive where is can scan your drive without the risk of causing further damage.

There are various drive scanning modes available, so should you find that the quick scan does not discover all of the files you have lost, a more intensive, but slower, scan can be performed. If you are keen to recover a particular file or folder before anything else, a search option is available to help you to home in on that particular data.

Includes a 1-PC license.

Review by Mark Wilson.