Portable UndeleteWizard

Hard disk drives, SD cards, and removable storage devices can become corrupt in time, and you can risk losing important files, and folders, or recent pictures stored on your camera. In this regard, specialized applications like Portable UndeleteWizard come with the means to help you recover files from beyond the Recycle Bin.

As the name clearly states, this is the edition of UndeleteWizard which skips you both the time, and effort of going through a setup process. On the one hand, you can carry it around on a thumb drive, just in case you need to use it on another computer. What’s more, system registries remain intact, and so does the target PC’s health status.

It’s best to plug in any external storage devices before you run the application, because there’s no refresh option. Moreover, the application can only read NTFS file systems, so older FAT types are a lost cause, at least if you’re relying on this application.

All detected drives are shown in a tree list, and expanding one immediately starts the scan process. It can take some time to finish, but this mostly depends on the health, state, and size of the target drive. Don’t be scared if the application seems not to respond, because it’s only the scan process thoroughly doing its job.

Once the scan process is done, all files and folders are shown, and you can now start looking for those missing items. One option is to use the dedicated search tab, which lets you locate files either by file mask, or name. Advanced parameters can also be used, such as date, size options, and more.

The other option is to manually look through the list of files. Since they’re not found by the original name, this can be a difficult task, but there is an option you can use to highlight only paths with deleted content. Saving can be done on the same drive, but it’s not recommended.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Portable UndeleteWizard comes in handy for recovering recently lost files, but only from NTFS file systems. The scan process can take a bit of time, but this is only because of the methods used, and thoroughness, while search rules let you quickly identify lost files.