One of the utilities I long missed when migrating from DOS/Windows 3.x was an easy-to-use, foolproof, undelete utility that captured all the files I deleted, as well as the files that software programs deleted. This became teeth-gnashingly obvious when I realized that the Windows Recycle Bin in Windows 98 and "above" does not capture all deleted files, especially files deleted from the DOS command line and from within DOS applications. (Mea culpa; I still use DOS applications.)

Filling that gap, and more, is Undelete from Executive Software, Burbank, Calif. Undelete captures files deleted within applications, from Windows Explorer, from the command prompt, and even from within DOS applications. The server version also captures files deleted over the network. Moreover, both Undelete versions — workstation and server — let you determine which files to capture for possible undeletion later.

I installed Undelete 2.1; it was a breeze. Some screen blinks, some grinds out of the hard drive, and then a dialog box dickered with me about who was going to restart the computer.

When first installed, the default "recovery bin size" for Undelete is 20% of the hard drive. Under Recovery Bin Properties, you can have the recovery bin on all drives (that is, partitions) or particular drives. You can choose having a single recovery bin for all drives or a recovery bin on each drive. You can even choose not to move files to the recovery bin, which seems oxymoronic for an undelete utility. Other options involve what to do when the bin becomes full and whether to save zero-length files.

I chose to enable the bin individually on each drive, choosing maximum sizes ranging from 3% of the drive space (61 MB on the drive that contains Windows 2000 plus some OS-related utilities) to 17% (524 MB for a small, mostly empty partition I use for data manipulations). I chose not to enable the recovery bin on the drive with the Windows pagefile and caches for various web browsers.

The other major decision is to review, and configure, the Exclusion List. Undelete lets you exclude files by drive and directory (including subfolders if desired), filename, and file type. (Note: Excluded files are truly deleted from your hard drive, or at least deleted to the point where undeleting will be difficult.)

Undelete also comes prepared to exclude a bunch of file types from all drives, such as $??, cab, err, flt, hst, lnk, and tmp. It also will exclude files with "ffast" in their name. Plus, it will exclude files contained in such directories as Cookies, System32NtmsData, System32\Spool, Temporary Internet Files, and Documents and Settings\[name]\Local Settings\Temp\.

After about an hour of normal use on the computer, I double-clicked on Undelete's recovery bin icon on the desktop to see what files were captured.

Up popped an Explorer-like two-pane window. The left pane displayed directory trees branching from my four partitions; the right pane displayed a list of captured files in the directory highlighted in the left pane. I nearly fell out of my chair. There were megabytes upon megabytes of backup files, temporary files, anti-virus logs, wayward browser cache files, Gator nonsense, Eudora logs and spool files, Cool Edit and Quicken who-knows-what files, plus a bunch of files with extensions that I never heard of before.

Winnowing out those files to exclude is somewhat tortuous in Undelete. The process is strictly point-and-click: drive and path, then Add Folder; or drive, path, and files, and then Add Files. You see the results in the Exclusion List. In some cases, it would have been much easier to just type in the path and file names, if you can't copy-and-paste that information from some other application.

Alternatively, you can right click on an existing (captured) directory or file name in the Explorer-like window. This presents options to recover, permanently delete, or add to the file exclusion list that specific folder, file, or file type that was right-clicked. Right-clicking makes configuring the Exclusion List just right and less of a chore.

That said, undeleting files works like a charm. Just right click on the file you want undeleted. If necessary, you can search the Recovery Bin for deleted files, by filename or original directory name, or both — wildcards acceptedand undelete what you find. You can undelete a file to its original location or to an alternate location. I often chose an alternate location when undeleting one of a series of iterative backup files, and I wasn't sure which one I really wanted. (This is especially true for the .bak files created by my DOS-based word processor.)

Finally a simple, foolproof, honest-to-goodness all-files undelete utility. Why, oh why, did I wait so long to install Undelete?

Undelete
Product: File recovery/undelete utility for Windows

List price: $30 for a single workstation (home version); $250 for electronic download, one license, server version (5 to 19 licenses: $210)

Operating systems: Microsoft Windows NT (SP3 or higher), 2000, XP

Download size: Version 3.0: 4.9 MB

Vendor: Executive Software International, Inc.
7590 North Glenoaks Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91504
(800) 829-6468; (818) 771-1600
www.execsoft.com

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