PC Inspector File Recovery

PC Inspector File Recovery is, as the name suggests, a data-recovery program. And it's free.

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File recovery programs come in many different flavours. They run the gamut from simple undelete programs that work only under optimal circumstances within Windows up to heavy-duty sector-by-sector scanners that can piece back together files sans file table or partition info.

Pros

  • Free

Cons

  • Limited functionality

Bottom Line

For free it's hard to complain, but PC Inspector is not a panacea for file recovery that the Web site might lead you to believe. Still, we'd give it a shot; if it works you just saved $40 or so.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    Free (AUD)

After reading the advertising, we assumed that freebie PC Inspector File Recovery fell into the latter category.

Alas, PC Inspector File Recovery was clueless when it came to a relatively simple test: recovering data from an NTFS drive that still contained data, but whose partition and file tables had been overwritten.

EasyRecovery Professional, Active @ File Recovery, and R-Studio Data Recovery were all able to pull files off of the same test drive. Of course, those programs aren't free, and PC Inspector File Recovery is.

If your drive used the FAT 32 file system, you might fare a bit better with PC Inspector File Recovery. We were able to recover files whose FAT info was lost as long as the partition info was available. The program also recovered deleted files (that hadn't been overwritten) just fine.

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