EasyRecovery Update Rescues Data

Ontrack has updated its trio of EasyRecovery programs, each application offering increasingly aggressive tools that can help you regain your lost data.

Ontrack markets all three products under the EasyRecovery 6 name and version number. EasyRecovery DataRecovery, priced at $199, is a basic data-recovery program that restores deleted files (including those on which Windows' own undelete capabilities would have given up long ago). It grabs what data it can off inaccessible partitions, and it repairs accessible but corrupted Microsoft Word and .zip files.

The $339 EasyRecovery FileRepair also mends Word and .zip files, using the same tools as DataRecovery. In addition it repairs Outlook, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

EasyRecovery Professional ($499) bundles the other two products along with drive diagnostics and more-powerful recovery tools.

Ontrack also provides a data-recovery service for situations when the software isn't sufficient. You ship your hard drive to Ontrack and keep your fingers crossed. If you're lucky, you'll get your data back on CDs, along with a hefty bill.

Like its competitors, Ontrack gives away a free demo version (in Ontrack's case, it's the Professional product) that shows you if a file is retrievable. If it is, you can decide which of the three full products you should buy to retrieve it.

New Design, Old Limits

Ontrack says the EasyRecovery 6 programs sport an improved user interface and a more intelligent design. For example, when you loaded the version 5 applications, they scanned the hard drive and then asked what you wanted to do (such as restore a deleted file). Now the programs inquire first, which might result in a quicker scan because the programs know what to search for.

The company has also added the capability to recover data to an FTP destination, so you can save your restored files onto another PC--even over the Internet. But this works only when your system is in good enough condition to boot into Windows. If you're forced to use the emergency boot floppy, you'll have to restore your data to a local disk.

Data disasters happen. When you lose important files (or, much worse, entire drives) and you don't have backups, you need to recover your data--a difficult and expensive undertaking. Ontrack's new EasyRecovery 6 trio of programs just may make it easier. But it will still be expensive.

The price for EasyRecovery FileRepair has gone both up and down, depending on how you look at it. The entire version 5 package of tools cost $749, more than twice the current version 6 price. But you didn't have to buy the whole package; previously you could purchase just an Excel-specific version for only $129--a good buy if an important spreadsheet suddenly went bad. Today you must purchase at least the EasyRecovery FileRepair bundle to get support for Excel files. By contrast, Ontrack's competitor Recoveronix still sells an Excel-specific repair program priced at $149.

Recoveronix doesn't sell a DataRecovery competitor, but Runtime Software does. It offers separate versions of its GetDataBack program to recover FAT files ($69) and NTFS files ($129).