Freeware Tools: Restoration 3.2.1

Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward portable tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows. Upon start, you can scan for all files that may be recovered and also limit the results by entering a search term or extension. Restoration also provides the option to wipe the found files beyond simple recovery. The program is small and standalone, it does not require installation. Restoration works with FAT and NTFS as well as digital cameras cards and supports all operating systems.

Recovering deleted files is a task that can be accomplished using a variety of tools, some of which target specific formats. Restoration is one of the apps that will help you get back erased data regardless of the file type you're after.

One of the greatest things about Restoration is that it doesn't need to be installed, so you can basically run it from a USB flash drive, a CD or even a floppy drive.

It has a nice, simple and very clean interface, with minimal settings, so you can easily take advantage of its powerful recovery features. Just pick the drives you want to scan for removed files, wait a little bit, choose the files and hit the Restore button to have them back.

Of course, scanning takes a while, especially if you have very large hard disks, but during our tests the overall search time was measured in seconds rather than in minutes. Also, the recovery was very efficient in our case, but it might sometimes fail if it has to deal with really old files that will be only partially restored.

Restoration is a pretty fast application and it works very smooth, so it won't eat up system resources while searching for files to be recovered.

Overall, Restoration is one of the first tools to try if you accidentally removed some important files, but just as any software it cannot do the impossible and bring back files erased beyond recovery.