Much better than the various commercial software I tried incl diskinternals etc. Had accidentally formatted a partition with important data (quick format, not full format - full format may be very difficult to recover)
It took some time to scan and some time for me to browse through the files to find the folders I wanted and then half an hour to copy those files. Best not to run too many other apps while its working. Also when copying data keep monitoring disk space as due to some junk files (which are recovered by all apps even commercial ones) the disk may run out of space so you may have to keep deleting those files as it works.

Very good software overall. Saved my day.

It works best if you don't have to do massive files recovery. The scan took 30 mins. for a 170gb. drive which was not completely filled. The scan cannot be saved and if the app fails you have to rescan again! Stopping it when it is processing will crash it, and it crashes if there's not enough space to save your recovered files to. The scanned files' original names is lost so user will have to save a lot of random files selectable by file type, and then open individually after to find out what they are.

I have just downloaded and used Version 4, it works for awhile brilliantly, but eventually it locks up. Sometimes I need to restart the computer to "clear the memory". Admittadly, I have a huge number of picture files to recover, overall it does quite a good job, some files understandably do not make it, but I am happy with the software.

If there is a solution to the lockups, it will be the ultimate program for this sort of work.

PC Inspector File Recovery (or PCI) is the best file recovery freeware application there is. It is better than many payware applications, but generally isn't quite as good as some of the payware recovery heavy hitters out there.

If you need something cheap, but more importantly you need it quick (no trip to the local software house or wasted time finding a credit card), PCI is your best bet.

Older versions had a tendency to crash (lock up) if the application found a lot of files to recover, but the kinks seem to be worked out in this version.

Download, recover, relax. Repeat as necessary.