Testdisk is harder to use but is one of the world's greatest file and partition recovery software. Just stick in a live cd and a few seconds later, you can recover almost anything on your hard drive!

One additional word to the always an again repeated item by "Ashraf" (from "dottech.org) "No Bootable Media included";
this is by far overestimated (and often not fair, because the software runs from everywhere)!

The MAIN issue is to have ...:
- either have the undeleter not installed on the drive which is to be recovered!!!
- or(/and..!) to have a general recovery media at hand!

who of us has NO bootable flash media or/and CD/DVD or/and hard drive ?
And:
I don´t wan´t to have to many forgotten "Boot Media" flying around in every corner!


My advice:
have a copy of the great "Hiren´s Boot CD" around (or build a universal boot media yourself with WinBuilder or similar tool):
With a little modification it will run most recovery software - just include serial of the chosen program (or have at least the serial(or .reg key) as text file included!
Hiren´s Boot CD will handle additional USB media - so you can use additional software easily.

I completely agree with wosa: experience shows that different tools work best in different circumstances. Last summer I was working on a set of photographs prior to backing them up and accidentally permanently deleted (as the recycle bin was nearly full) a whole year's worth, about 5,000. Luckily my general utilities Undelete tool quickly got them nearly all back in the correct structure with the right names.

When a friend recently accidentally deleted all his documents from the only source left on a backup drive before a reinstall the same technique failed completely. I tried all of the best known programs in the field, but in the end the one that worked best was Recover My Files. It did not succeed in finding the original names, but did retrieve the content in most cases. Some of the others not only took many (even 36) hours, but also generated hundreds of gigabytes of rubbish.

# 3 Thanks for your extensive analysis
My thank you goas also to other members for their valuable remarks

Let me add my 3 peennies.
1.
There is one more application, which according to my experience, is worth mentioning, i.e. GetDataBack. The application saved – – Under Win XP SP 3 – my three 3TB USB NTFS discs loaded up to 80% of their capacity. The discs were destroyed by a renowned programme error in such a manner that they were visible to BIOS, but not to Windows and DOS CD discs produced by other recovery tools. The rescue application, (GetDataBack) was able to see and recover the discs with all their folder structure and almost all files. The application was also able to restore discs from other defects, including the crash of the main file table on a Sygate 3TB disc (from their infamous defective series.)
The programme is not inexpensive but really reliable at a price of being somewhat slower than other similar applications. The application is easy to operate but should not be used by "absent-minded" individuals. Needless to say I am not their agent, shareholder etc. I just happen to have come across the application on the net when I was desperate to recover my valuable resources.

2.
According to my esperience Easeus and some other recovery tools have one disadvantage: they recover files with proper names and sizes, but are unable to determine, if the format (particularly: header) of the file is recovered correctly, which eventually gives you, for instance, hundreds of jpg or mpg files which look "good" in Windows Explorer, but are useless as their headers (or other parts) have not been properly recovered. Once I happened to have been happy seeing all my 100 images and some 50 clips recovered, but then I found only 2 of them were really recovered in a usable format.

I had this from another giveaway. Used it before to recover from a friend's sd memory card. It did the task well. Easy to use, solid and reliable.

Tested this when given away before: Not bad... If there were no better tools around! "Found" too many trash instead otf the real files (see below).

For a friend of mine recently had REAL crash, I was able/forced to do full tests on more than a dozen recovery tools under realistic circumstances:
1 TB HD, lost a big 858 GB NTFS partition with many lost/overwritten sectors at the beginning of the partition sectors (I guess trough either a faulty program, or playing around with boot managers).
It was unaccessible, though still had a boot sector and held (before...) some 100.000 files(!).

FIRST REMARK:
NO ONE could EVER test ALL conditions and NO APPLICATION can say to be the best for ALL scenarios! there are too much possible errors around ... But what I CAN say after years of experience is:
1. to recover accidental deleted files, most of the well known programs WILL do.
2. on complex and almost complete destroyed drives it depends on what you are looking for:
- simply looking for KNOWN lost files or file types there will work a bunch of tools rather fine (see other tests and suggestions of serious magazines and blogs)
- to recover as much as possible even under worst circumstances, included as much as possible of the folder structure - I found only two programs worth to work with:
a) EASEUS_Data_Recovery (free to recover up to 2 GB of data...)
b) Auslogics File Recovery 3 (many giveaways of limited number of licenses an a general giveaway by 'Downloadcrew' 3 years ago)


ONLY those tools delivered BEST results considering ALL my(!) - important criteria:

- number of found files (found equal or MORE than 'big' companies´ tools...)
- Folder structure (all 'big' companies´ tools failed on this!)
- reliable results (many giveaway delivered MUCH more fake/useless files...)
- number of correct names of the files (MUCH better than any other solutions!)
- possibility to preview found files
- both could sort all result by any given criteria

o EASEUS_Data_Recovery was slightly better in the number of found files at the FOUND scenario

o Auslogics FileRecovery 3 brought very similar results with some (not much) less files found and some (not much) truncated file names (seemingly files with mor tha 1 dot and spaces in its original names...)
A 2nd disadvantage: Auslogics automatically created an additional long folder path:
X:\PhysicalDrive3\Lost Partition (NTFS, 858 GB)\" which could become a (minor) additional problem as for reading in too long filenames (some prgrams may fail on this...).


BUT now the clue:

when I deleted the bootsector as well just for do testing again (could easily happen in real scenarios!!) I found
ONLY Auslogics File Recovery 3 was not impressed and found again as much as before, while now Easeus fell far behind (to the better one of the other solutions)

CONCLUSION
- All in all, Auslogics File Recovery 3 was the clear winner
- Easeus is really worth keeping as it was firstly not only close to, but even.
- For 'standard' undeleting recuva (and some others are quick an sufficient)
- SO HAVE AT LEAST 2, better 3 tools ready for worst case precautions!

Installed and registered without problems on a Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit system.

A russian company with address&phone.

We had many programs from this company. Basically all the same in different flavors. A bit like icecream. If you don't like vanilla, you'll get banana.

Easy Drive Data Recovery 3.0 May 13, 2014
Easy Digital Photo Recovery 3.0 April 21, 2014
Easy File Undelete 3.0 March 6, 2014
Easy Office Recovery 2.0 February 17, 2014
MunSoft Data Recovery Suite 2.0 January 15, 2014
Easy Archive Recovery 2.0 October 16, 2013
Easy Drive Data Recovery 3.0 August 27, 2013 ... oops!

...the same program from August 27th again? Why not.

Despite of the many variants, this is still a good an reliable software. With the time, you can collect all variants - like stamps. I'm neither a stamp collector nor a software variants collector.
It seems I have a rare misprint:

The scrollbar on the right lower side is flickering.

If you don't have already such a program, you can keep it.

I'll uninstall it via reboot.

I'm not very enthused by this review.

http://www.berserkcomputers.co.uk/review-of-munsoft-easy-drive-data-recovery/

Slightly better one here.

http://dottech.org/97014/windows-review-munsoft-easy-drive-data-recovery/

No bootable media support.