Review: PC Inspector Smart Recovery - File Resurrection for free

Before looking at the pros and cons of this software, here is what the developers promise:

PC Inspector File Recovery contains the following features:

"- Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged

- Recovers files with the original time and date stamp

- Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives

- Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. Competition products cannot recover such files. The "Special Recovery Function" supports the following disk formats:

ARJ | AVI | BMP | CDR | DOC | DXF | DBF | XLS | EXE
GIF | HLP | HTML | HTM | JPG | LZH | MID | MOV | MP3
PDF | PNG | RTF | TAR | TIF | WAV | ZIP

PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 4.x is so-called FREEWARE. This means that the software does not cost you a single penny." (Quoted from: http://www.pcinspector.de/Default.htm?language=1 )


...Aand this is exactly what this software does. If you have deleted a photo, video, textfile or whatever kind of popular filetype within the last few days without having installed new software or having put large files onto your partition - then this is the product of your choice.

PROs:

- Costs 0$
- Does the job if the file was deleted not long ago


CONs:

- Sometimes hard to operate (Instructions: http://www.pcinspector.de/FileRecovery/instructions.htm?po=2&language=1 )
- Doesn't find the files if they were deleted too long ago
- Takes very long for indexing (=kind of loading the deleted files) and recovering

Summary:

Nice little freeware if the recovery-job isn't too diddicult. If you didn't get the desired results using "PC Inspector", I recommend using a more expert-like program (of which I'm also gonna post a few reviews), which may cost you a few bucks. Sometimes those lost files are worth heavy money, though ;)