Boomerang Data Recovery 3.0.16

Recover files lost due to accidental or mistaken actions within your system. Scan the drives and folders and analyze traces of info removed or corrupted due to formatted disk, unreadable segments, deleted files, accidental re-install of system components, etc.

Boomerang Data Recovery is a file and disk recovery solution. It was released for Windows and Mac OS X. It allows you to recover deleted files, photos and iPods, restore formatted partitions, RAIDs, and drives/disks. The application uses a wizard to guide you through the recovery process, and I thought everything was very intuitive and easy to follow. My knowledge of partitions and file systems is limited, but I know I hate losing files. So, to test this application, I went with the logical approach. I deleted a file before running this tool. The file in question was an AVI video file of approximately 350 megabytes in size.

I started by selecting the "Deleted files" module from the main window, which started the wizard. After telling the application what hard drive the file was on, the search options came up. Here, I could look for the type of file that I wanted to recover. There is an "Audio and Video Files" category, which included the .AVI extension, so I went with that. To narrow down the search parameters, I told this app to look for files smaller than 400 megabytes. After some scanning, the application finished, but I only got one result, which was the name of the hard drive my file was on. The file was 0KB in size. I re-did the search a few times, and I checked all the file types and removed the "maximum file size to recover" option, but nothing happened.

I can't say if the other features work, or if "deleted files" will work for you. It did not for me.