Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
Kickass Undelete is a free, fully featured, file recovery tool for Windows. Accidentally deleted a file? Never fear; the data is probably still on your drive and may be recoverable. Kickass Undelete finds all of the deleted files on your hard drive, flash drive or SD card and allows you to recover them.
Features:
Free and Open Source
Support for both FAT and NTFS filesystems
Filter by filename and extension
Easy-to-use interface
Unreasonably large scan button
Open source, fast scanning and very easy to use. Lightweight at 194kb uncompressed. Took 10 seconds to scan a 24GbB partition and less than 2 minutes for a heavily used 65GB partition. Writes to MUICache in registry, but I didn't investigate any further than that for portability.
Great stuff. Any sense if it's better than FreeRecover (also an open source undelete tool I've had good luck with)? Right away I'd note the lack of a dotNET requirement but was just curious.
Just checked. Uses dotNET. The same .dll as FreeRecover. It doesn't appear to create any files or directories. I compared the speed of FreeRecover to Kickass Undelete on the same 37GB (of 60GB total) partition and got the following times for a scan:
I needed to recover a deleted file from the OS and got a chance to try several file recovery apps on my XP SP3 system. Although I regularly backup certain folders like My Documents, portable apps, etc, this file was located outside of those backups. This was a chance to test some of these apps on a "real world" problem. Here is what I tried:
1st: Kickass Undelete - Scanned very fast at first, but hung towards the end. Tried it several times with the same result. It never listed the file I was looking for in the partial results.
2nd: FreeRecover - Much slower scanning, but it seemed to be more thorough. However, it took so long to complete that I stopped it and decided to try something else. The file I was looking for was never listed in the partial results.
3rd: Restoration - Unlike Kickass Undelete and FreeRecover, which scan the entire drive, Restoration has the option to scan for a specific file using its full or partial filename. It's very fast, but it didn't find the file.
4th: Undelete Plus - This also scans the entire drive. It took over 1.5 hours to reach 73% completion when I stopped it. The file I was looking for was never listed in the partial results.
Although I had several other apps to try, I got impatient at this point and used a commercial program to restore the file from an full system incremental backup, which took only a few minutes.
This is not to say that any of the file recovery apps are not useful, it just depends on several factors and the circumstances, such as the age of the deleted file, where it was located, and how quickly the file is needed. It turns out the file I needed was in an incremental backup previous to the last one performed. It's possible that no app could have recovered that file. This shows that nothing beats a full system backup.
It was an informal test, but thought it could be useful as a reference. I'm unsure why Kickass Undelete didn't complete its scan since it did so the first time I tried it. I do know that I had recently updated it to the newer version though. Also, I had many more deleted files since that time after some major "housecleaning." All of the apps except Restoration slowed to a crawl with increasing CPU usage as the scans progressed, making the PC virtually unusable for other tasks. All of them, again except for Restoration, either locked up or scanned at extremely low speeds after the halfway way point and I had to reboot after trying each one. It's frustrating to wait for a scan to complete, especially when there's no guarantee that the file sought can be recovered.
Anyway, next time I'll use some of the other data recovery apps and see how they compare and post the results (if I remember). I'm not in any hurry to do that yet though.
I was impressed. The program starts without admin with a very helpful user notice:
Maybe the only flaw is that the program has perhaps the biggest "start" and "finished" button at the top of the screen, but it did seem to find some useful results: https://i.imgur.com/GU4iGoc.png (not linking inline as this is a larger image)
