Restoration v3.2.13 Review

Restoration is an extremely lightweight, portable, and very easy to use free data recovery program for Windows.

Although it's missing some features found in some other file recovery software I've looked at, this program also includes some unique features that you might find helpful.

Keep reading this review to learn more about how Restoration works and what I liked about it, or see How to Recover Deleted Files for a complete tutorial on recovering files you've deleted.

Pros & Cons

Restoration isn't my favorite file recovery software, but it does work if you need a program like this in Windows 7 or an older Windows OS.

More About Restoration

• Restoration is said to run on Windows 95 through Windows XP, but I've also successfully used it in Windows 7
• Files can be recovered from NTFS and FAT formatted drives, which are two of the most common file systems in use today
• You can sort the results of a scan by the file name, date modified, size, and folder
• A search tool lets you search through the deleted files to find one of a particular name or file extension
• Restoration can optionally search for empty files as well
• From the Others menu, you can choose Delete Completely to apply the Random Data and Write Zero data sanitization methods to permanently delete all the files in the search results

My Thoughts on Restoration

It's essential you don't overwrite the files you're trying to recovery, which is why it's important to use a file recovery program from a different hard drive than the one that has the deleted files. Fortunately, Restoration is entirely portable, which means you can run it from a USB device, floppy, or any other device that's not the one you're working with.

Some file recovery programs, like Wise Data Recovery and Recuva, tell you how recoverable a file is before you undelete it. This is an extremely helpful feature so you're not restoring files that are too corrupted to be used.

Restoration doesn't have this feature, but it does have an option called "Include used clusters by other files," which, when unselected, will prevent files from showing up in the results if part of it is being used by another file, and thus not 100 percent recoverable.

Something I don't like about Restoration is that it only lets you recover single files. This means you can't browse through the search results to restore a whole folder of deleted data. Instead, you can either restore one or multiple files at a time.