NTFSWalker

There doesn’t necessarily have to be an issue or malicious content which makes you lose some files, because a disk drive can become corrupt, or someone can easily delete files of interest. In this regard, you can use specialized applications like NTFSWalker, even for times when you accidentally remove them.

You can run the application right after download is done, because it doesn’t take you through an installer in order to function, meaning you can carry it around on a thumb drive to perform recovery on other computers. What’s more, there’s no need to worry about the target PC’s health status, because registries are not modified.

Launching the app brings up a list of all drives it detects, whether they’re physical, logical, removable, or virtual. However, as the name clearly points out, you need to make sure target drives use the NTFS file system, otherwise you can’t scan, nor recover. Only one partition can be selected per operation.

Scanning doesn’t take a lot of time, and before you know it, all files and folders are enlisted in a dedicated panel. The application performs a low-level structure scan on NTFS partitions, and chances are files of interest can’t really be found by name.

The list of results show MFT value on drive, name, size, date created, and modified, as well as attributes. Unfortunately, you need to manually go through the list until reaching files of interest, because there’s no built-in search function, nor can you filter by clicking column headers.

However, if you do manage to find items of interest, multiple related data fields can be accessed, and recovery takes several seconds, depending on size. Apart from general file info, the application also lets you get a preview, for text and pictures, as well as Hex data, all accessible through dedicated panes.

NTFSWalker is a powerful file recovery application, but it’s not quite intended for everyone. Its algorithms help scrape low-level structures on NTFS partitions, showing heavily-detailed info on existing, and removed files. This way, it comes in handy for thorough scanning of drives, and not recovery from simple, accidental deletion.