iCare Data Recovery Free 6 Review

Once files and folders are seemingly gone forever after deleting them by accident, losing them to virus attacks, or formatting the drive, it's time to resort to data recovery software and get back on track.

One of the lesser known apps in this field is iCare Data Recovery. Its free edition represents a very basic application dedicated to restoring multiple types of data. Before proceeding any further, users should know that this version is not designed for retrieving photographs; it can only identify them. Unlocking this feature means upgrading to iCare Data Recovery Standard or Professional, which are obviously not free.

Speaking of file formats, iCare Data Recovery Free offers support for documents (.doc/.docx, .xls/.xlsx, .ppt/.pptx, .pdf, .html/.htm), archives (e.g. .zip, .rar, .gz), audio and video files (e.g. .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .aac, .avi, .mp4, .3gp, .avi, .swf, .mov), emails (e.g. .dbx, .pst), and others. Apart from hard disks, it can retrieve data from SSDs and flash disks.

Installing the app is done quickly and painlessly. Its interface consists of a simplistic wizard split into three sections: selecting the file types to scan for, picking the target drive, and recovering the identified files.

The first window shows three huge buttons that covers most of the section. Users may look for music or movies only, or just include the entire supported file types in the scan. The next stage shows all available partitions (including external disks and USB flash drives), along with their drive type (logical, system), file system, total size, and free space. After carefully inspecting this information, users can make their selection and proceed to the next step.

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free drive selection step

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free scanning part

Select a drive and wait for the scanner to finishDepending on the size of the drive and file type method, the scanning may take a while; it displays a progress bar during this time. As far as results are concerned, iCare organizes all found files into format types and assigns numbers to them. Photos can be previewed.

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free scanner results

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free recovery job

Select files and save them anywhere on the diskAll selected files can be extracted to any part of the hard disk by pointing out a directory. When the recovery operation finishes, iCare pops up a message dialog to indicate its success, and gives users the possibility to open the output directory without leaving the interface.

Evaluating performance

iCare Data Recovery Free was put to the test on an Intel Core i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz with 12GB RAM and a 500GB Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 7200RPM HDD, running Windows 8.1 Pro.

The target was a drive with 172 files of multiple formats spread across a 10GB directory. Our initial objective was to measure the app's efficiency in data recovery after Shift+Delete, quick format, normal format, and deleted partition modes.

The entire data from the drive was wiped with 7 passes using CCleaner's Drive Wiper tool between each of the four recovery tests.

In all tests, the app took approximately 4 minutes to finish scanning, and about 3 minutes to recover identified files. CPU and RAM consumption was low. All recovered files were intact.

After deleting the files with Shift+Delete, iCare managed to identify and recover 135 files with a total worth of 3.87GB. Taking the recovered items' size into account, this represents 38,7% of the total deleted files. After erasing all data with quick format mode, the tool found and retrieved 135 files with a total size of 3.96GB, which is 39,6% of the total deleted files. We ran secondary scans in both tests, but iCare returned the same results.

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free recovery statistics after Shift+Delete deletion mode

Showing the iCare Data Recovery Free recovery statistics after Quick Format deletion mode

Statistics after Shift+Delete and Quick Format, respectivelySurprisingly, the utility's success ratio slightly improved in the second test. However, iCare came away empty-handed after normal quick mode. Suffice it to say, we ended our evaluation here without proceeding with partition deletion.

The Good

iCare Data Recovery Free is extremely easy to work with, especially if users do not have prior experience with data recovery software. Windows 8/8.1 (32- and 64-bit) is supported.

The tool offers support for a wide area of file types, as well as file systems (EXFAT, NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, FAT12), SSDs, external hard disks, USB flash drives, and memory cards.

The Bad

Advanced users are likely to quickly become disappointed with iCare Data Recovery Free. Apart from the fact that it does not feature any kind of notable configuration settings, it does not show progress statistics (e.g. elapsed time, size of identified files). On top of that, finding specific items within the entire recovered data can rapidly become time-consuming, considering that the app cannot identify the original file names (it assigns numbers to the identified and recovered files instead).

Users should be careful when specifying the output location for recovering files. iCare does not actually save the files inside the indicated directory, but creates another folder instead, in the same location as the user-defined one.

The program does not alert users when attempting to extract data to the same drive.

The Truth

Unfortunately, iCare Data Recovery Free has a long way to go before it can be considered a serious data recovery application. Although it is a free tool, we expected better performance results.

iCare Data Recovery Free 6 Review

key review info

application features

Evaluating performance

The Good

The Bad

The Truth