After you fire up the software and choose either a physical or logical (drive letter) drive to access, you can browse a listing of potentially recoverable files or folders from the drive's nether regions. There's also a search feature that supports wildcards, but more often than not it was unable to find a file even when we knew its exact name.
Aside from the basics like name, size, and the date deleted, the software reports the file or folder's condition as either good or poor. You can recover a file/folder by saving it to a new location via a right-click context menu. Here you'll find an example of PCI File Recovery's interface issues: Since it doesn't use the Windows common dialog, you can't create a new folder as a destination from the save dialog.
Users will likely most often find themselves in need of a straightforward file restoration — recovering files that were inadvertently deleted and then purged from the Recycle Bin. We conducted a number of file recovery attempts using a 500 GB hard drive formatted with NTFS and configured as the secondary hard drive in a Windows XP system, and our results were somewhat mixed.
The good news was that when run immediately after deleting files and folders, PCI File Recovery was always able to detect and recover the missing data. The bad news is that in many cases, the software wasn't able to restore the original names of folders (or files if they were stored in the drive's root folder). In these cases, in lieu of the original name the recovered files were successively numbered with a "DF" prefix, though the file extension was always correctly preserved.
Aside from a simple file deletion there are other causes of lost data, like a system crash that causes a file to not be saved correctly and become corrupted or an inadvertent drive formatting. In cases like this the recovery process became a lot longer and less certain, since the PCI File Recovery needs to scan the entire surface of the disk for residual data.
This can take an extremely long time, especially on extremely large drives — on our 500GB drive it was an overnight process and then some. While we were able to use PCI File Recovery to restore files lost as a result of a so-called "quick" format, attempts to recover files lost to a regular format procedure proved unsuccessful.
Conclusion
Recovering lost data depends on numerous variables, and no software can guarantee success. PCI File Recovery certainly doesn't earn high marks for its ease-of-use, although we were able to successfully recover numerous files and folders with it, albeit sans names in some cases. That, coupled with the extremely reasonable price (you can't beat free), make the software at least worth checking out.
Pros: Freeware, recovers lost files and data (most of the time)
Cons: Confusing interface and minimal documentation, doesn't always recover file and folder names
