Simple File Recovery With Ashampoo Undeleter

Ashampoo Undeleter works simply and it works well. It recovers recently deleted files as long as they haven’t been overwritten. All you do is run the program, select a volume (e.g. C:), then click the Search button. Ashampoo Undeleter will list any files it finds, allowing you to select each or any of them for restoration. The problem is, this $15 undelete utility does nothing that free competitors don’t.

While Ashampoo Undeleter is simple to use, it could do a slightly better job of organizing and showing recoverable files. Unlike in most programs of this type, there’s no date modified column to let you can arrange the files in the order they were deleted. You can view them in alphabetical order or in the order they were recovered, but that’s not as helpful. This is a serious issue only if you have files with the same names, but it could be handy in a number of circumstances.

Undeleter worked fine in my testing, but the claim on the website that it works with Windows encryption is a bit misleading. It found the encrypted files that were deleted, but would not restore them except as a bumch of gobbledegook. To be fair, I’m not aware of any program that will restore encrypted files.

If Recuva and a couple of other free undelete utilities didn’t exist, I might recommend Ashampoo Undeleter. But why pay when something equally as effective is available for free? If you absolutely want to try it and only have a few files to recover, then the ten-day demo will serve you well as a one-off utility.

–Jon L. Jacobi