So here you are, just came back from a great vacation with friends or family. You were thrilled and excited with all the activities. You of course took pictures of them to savor the memories. Then your friends wanted to see those pictures. Then finally, the moment you’re about to transfer them to your PC, you’re getting this ‘device not formatted’ message and the thought of losing all those precious captured moments in an instant. Sounds familiar? Then we’ve all encountered this problem at one point, thinking that we’ve lost it.
Fortunately for us there’s a lot of applications out there that allow the recovery and retrieval of those never-thought-to-be-retrieved pictures. For today, we’ll review the Wondershare Photo Recovery tool to see if it really gets the job done.
System Requirements
Features
Now how is this even possible? When a file is deleted on your PC, the file isn’t actually deleted. What happens is that Windows ‘tags’ the space occupied by that file as empty, thus allowing your system to overwrite it with a new file as if it’s really empty. So in essence, if in any case that you’ve deleted something you shouldn’t, the best thing is to immediately run this software and not do anything to lessen the risk of your file being overwritten.
As seen in this features tidbit, this program covers most of the possible ways in which loss of data can occur, though we’ll warn you as this isn’t a complete recovery tool. Despite being named as a ‘photo recovery’ software, it can actually retrieve files other than pictures as seen below:
Basically, this program is a multimedia recovery software. While some may see this as a limiting factor, the program is written thinking of the type of files that may be easily lost. More often than not, these includes photos, music and video — those that are copied often that may cause data corruption.
User Interface / Functions
Another plus to this program is its simplicity of interface. To show this, let’s run a simple recovery from a typical 2GB flash drive:
At start up, the program allows the user to choose which drive or removable media or device to scan. If you’re worrying about those ‘device not formatted’ once, then worry not as even those are scanned by this nifty tool.
As an additional bonus, you can opt to filter which file types would be included in the scan. So if you’re quite sure that you only wanted to get the images, you can filter our the others so that the scanning time would be much shorter.
Clicking ‘scan’ from the previous screen will bring you to this screen where it displays the results of the scan in mainly 3 panels. The one in the left shows the file types that are scanned, mainly group to photo, video and audio. Then on the top right is a preview pane where you can see the scanned file. We do take note that while this panel is a good addition, it won’t be quite useful to music and video files. Then there’s the third panel below the preview pane that lists all the scanned files and you can then select the ones to be recovered. Again, if they’ve provided some way to resize this panel given the limited functionality of the preview pane, then it will be better. But otherwise, the program works as it should without all the extra stuff that makes these kinds of tasks more tedious.
Recovery is also easy, just select the files for retrieval then click on the recover button below, the program then allows the options to select to where the recovered files will be placed. As simple as one-two-three, you have the files you thought were gone for good. If you wanted to perform another recovery for the same device at some other time, you can also save the scan by clicking the ‘save scan’ button and at the main screen, click the ‘Resume Recovery’ button to continue where you left off as seen below:
Final Thoughts
The main selling point of this program is its simplicity and ease of use, with just a few clicks and you can recover files to your liking. In other words, the program works wonders for its simple package. Then you might be asking, is it worth the $30 price tag? If it’s for the recovery of all those precious memories, then its definitely worth it. One can easily earn $30, but the memories entwined with your photos are not. Get your copy at Wondershare, it’s highly recommended.
