Overview

When cleaning your computer from junk files, it’s not an impossible scenario to accidentally delete photos, music or videos you actually want to keep. In cases like these people often think that the data has been gone for good and the action can’t be reversed, however they don’t know that there exist special software for undeleting data, and that O&O Media Recovery is one of them. The program scans your computer for all files that can be restored and then displays them in a list. You can also specify filters which will help you find the desired items easier.

Installation

The installation goes smoothly and has no difficult steps which require you to make any settings. After clicking the “Next” button a few times, the main installation will begin and finish shortly. No malicious or other kinds of additional software are included in this package.

Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. In fact, the recently released version 8 of Media Recovery has been given a lot of attention to improve Windows 8 experience.

Interface

After launching the program for the first time, you will be asked to enter your registration code, buy one or continue with the trial version. In the screen afterwards will be prompted to enter your email address in order to subscribe O&O’s newsletter and receive the latest news about their products. Then the main program will load, with information in regards to the program’s functionality and a few options at the bottom, which include loading a stored data rescue for continuance and executing data rescue from an image. Clicking “Next” will take you to the drive selection screen to choose a partition on which you would like to restore data. The next screen will give you an overview of your choices and then the search will initiate.

Pros

The program will scan the entire partition and display all the available items, which you can then analyze and recover. Using filters, like file size or date filters, you can narrow down the number of results and find easier what you’re looking for. In addition, a preview is available for image files - meaning that you don’t have to recover them to see their content.

Media Recovery integrates with O&O DiskImage, therefore images created with the latter can be accessed and have their data restored.

If you’re in a hurry, you can interrupt the scan at any given moment and resume it later. After the scan has finished you can save a report in .RTF format for future reference.

Cons

The scan is performed on the whole disk/partition and searches for all recoverable data, meaning it takes longer to finish, in contrast to a scan where you would first select the file type, size etc.

Alternatives

FarStone TotalRecovery (paid) is a nice alternative that does exactly the same job and has about the same features with O&O MediaRecovery. One of their differences is that TotalRecovery cannot include images in its scans. Handy Recovery (paid) is a similar program.

Conclusion

After an unfortunate event in which valuable files of yours had been deleted, don’t think it’s over. Get O&O Media Recovery ASAP and bring back those files!