Time to get a bit more serious. We took a partition on our test systems and deleted it with extreme prejudice. We then loaded up Handy Recovery 2.0, hit the 'find partitions' button, indicated the correct disk and let it attempt to discover the missing data. Our lost partition quickly showed up, and we were easily able to grab our files from the drive and restore them.

One nice feature we noticed is that you do not have to wait for Handy Recovery to finish scanning for partitions or analyzing a partition before getting to work. As soon as the program detected the deleted partition, we were able to double click it and begin analyzing it, and as soon as files showed up during that process we could recover them without waiting for the analysis to finish. This speeds up the recovery process greatly.

We now proceeded to build a new NTFS partition over the one we had just deleted, quick formatting the drive. Handy Recovery analyzed the new partition and found all the missing files, though this time they were marked as deleted. Full recovery was achieved again.

Beyond the Specs: Restoring data from a fully formatted partition

According to SoftLogica, Handy Recovery 2.0 cannot recover data from partitions which have been fully formatted, so we were in uncharted waters with this test. Taking the same partition, we now fully (not quick) formatted it and attempted to recover our data again. Handy Recovery came through once more, retrieving all the missing data properly. Keep in mind though, that no new data was written to the formatted partition before the recovery tests were conducted.

Based on what we've seen, Handy Recovery *should be* quite capable of more demanding restoration work such as retrieving files from damaged drives. Of course, the program itself is not going to perform miracles. If your data is in damaged sectors or has been written over by new data, you're going to have to resort to a paid data recovery service in most instances.

Using the Disk Imaging Feature

The Handy Recovery 2.0 software also features a basic disk cloning application which can write a full copy of a partition to a file and then do recovery operations on that file just like it was a full partition. This feature could come in extremely handy when attempting to recover data from a damaged or defective drive, as the longer you access the physical drive, the worse the damage can get. By copying the partitions off the drive, you reduce the risk of total failure.

Note that this feature cannot clone whole physical drives, just individual partitions.

We had some strange results when testing this feature with some small 2 and 5GB partitions we created specially. The copying process seemed to work fine, but then at the end it told us that the 'operation was cancelled by the user.' When we checked the files that were created on the disk (no form of compression is used, so the files are the exact size of the original partitions) they seemed to be complete and we could access all the data on them through Handy Recovery 2.0. Not a major bug then, but an odd one.