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Recuva vs Recover My Files ($70)


eniwetok

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I installed a $70 data recovery program called Recover My Files just to see what it could do. I set the filter to find every file it could on a 512meg SD memory card that's just been used for photos and video. It took 30 minutes to do a deep sector scan. It found 141 files. All showed up in preview mode but some said they were only about 320kBs... way too small considering it was from a 5megapixel camera. When I tried to recover these small files, they were corrupted.

 

I did a deep scan in Recuva which took about 1 minute. It found 138 photos and 38 videos. The ones that could not be recovered using Recover My Files WERE recovered using Recuva.

 

Go figure.

 

Maybe I'll redo the test... and there are other options besides the 30min scan. But they are not turning up many files.

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I just did a second test... maybe one that was more fair... maybe not since Recover My Files has so many options. I'm using a 512meg SD card that's only used on my digital camera. When I transfer files to my PC I use the "move" method.

 

Using Recuva's deep scan I was able to recover 137 jpegs and 37 .mov files. Some files were renamed. Total data recovered was 461 megabytes. None of the .mov files were duplicates.

 

I used Recover My File's Complete File Search (as opposed to Quick Search) at both the cluster and sector levels searching both deleted and lost jpegs and .mov files both in active and inactive areas. I initially recovered 152 jpegs but 11 were duplicates with different file names. So there was a total of 143 jpegs recovered. I only recovered 15 .mov files... all with original file names... none with created names as was the case with most of the jpegs. Total data recovered minus the 11 duplicate photos... 230 megs.

 

I merged the RMF and Recuva photos together and while there were some extra ones recovered by RMF, none were NOT recovered by Recuva. They must have been assigned more duplicate file names.

 

All of RMF's advanced search options didn't help it in what should have been a pretty simple test... and the thumbnail feature in Recuva is certainlly better than the one at a time preview in RMF.

 

All that being said I know fully well there are countless other file types and circumstances. None the less this simple test proves that just because a program goes for $70, doesn't mean it has to be any good.

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Just did a test using the same SD card using Easeus Date Recovery Wizard (DRW) another $70 program.

 

The demo found the same jpegs as Recuva and Recover My Files (RMF)... but like RMF it had problems with all the videos that no longer had most of their original file name. So it only picked up 15 .mov video files when there's some 37 .mov videos on the card... and it would only recover about 235megs of data... which is pretty pathetic compared to Recuva's 461 megs of recovered data.

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I just installed a copy of Restorer Ultimate v5 (RU5). There's supposed to be two versions of this program... regular and Pro. There was no clear download link for the Pro version so I have to assume this is the $30 software.

 

Running the simple file scan on the same SD card used above, it picked up 32 files (15 video and 17 photos) totaling 85megs of data.

 

Running the disk scan which is supposed to find more files, RU5 picked up 27 files (15 video and 12 photos) totaling 85 megs of data.

 

Running the disk scan with the RAW file search enabled RU5 picked up 156 files (15 video and 141 photos) totaling

230 megs of data.

 

Again like other software I've tested RU5 NOT detecting those 20 or so .mov videos which make up half the data on the SD card. Recuva DID recover these .mov files.

 

Once again I'm a bit in shock that these expensive programs are not doing their job. Yet a consumer might be happy because without any comparison, they won't know what they COULD recover.

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Installed the latest Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery demo and again tested the same SD card from my camera.

 

Using the Quick Scan it found 26 files totaling 85.7 megs

 

Using the Deleted File Recovery (deep scan) it found 26 files 85.7 megs

 

Using the Formatted/Lost File Recovery: 26 files, 87.7 megs

 

In the Advanced tab I ran a RAW search making sure it included ALL file types. It found 133 photo totally 172 megs. It found NO .mov videos.

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