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| Product: Lost & Found |
Company: PowerQuest |
| Web: www.powerquest.com |
Phone: 801-437-8900 |
| Platform: Win95/98/NT DOS 5.0 |
SRP: US$70
Street Price: US$50 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
As a computer consultant, I can't tell you how many distress calls I've gotten from friends and clients who've lost a hard drive and had no back-up of their data. There was the couple with six months of fried financial records, the budding writer who lost over a month's worth of her great American novel and a number of other equally tragic (and clueless) situations. They always want to know how much a data recovery service is going to cost. When I tell them it could be hundreds (even thousands) of dollars, depending on the nature of the damage, the necessity of regular back-ups becomes a hard-learned lesson.
Now there's a way to do disk recoveries on your own, thanks to PowerQuest's Lost & Found software. The company claims that if the disk is still spinning, there's a good chance of recovering your data. The program can recover files lost due to disk crashes, corrupted media, system failure, even files that were unintentionally deleted from either your hard disk or removable media (any IDE, EIDE and SCSI disk-drives). It also doesn't matter which File Allocation Table (FAT16 or FAT32 partitions) you use.
Lost & Found isn't the most user-friendly program I've ever seen. Trying to piece together data files on a diseased computer is not always a pretty sight. If you're an experienced PC user (especially one who isn't afraid of a DOS prompt), you should have no problem figuring the program out. If you're a more casual user, find the "alpha geek" in your neighborhood or office and ask him or her to help out. Whatever you need to bribe them with (a pizza and frappuccino will probably do), it'll be worth it.
The only big drawback to Lost & Found is that you can only use the program on one system. The first time you run it, it's registered with that machine. So, if you have more than one PC, or buy a new one, you'll have to spring for another copy. This is a small drawback given how much sending a drive out for professional recovery will cost you. Also unlike other programs (which can cost *much* more), you don't have to have the program pre-installed. You run it from the floppy only after your drive's gone kablooey.
But whatever you do, don't let having Lost & Found waiting on your bookshelf lull you into a sense of false security. Repeat after me: If you can't afford to lose it, BACK IT UP!
- Gareth Branwyn [6/14/99]
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