How many people out there have deleted something by accident, or if not by accident, have you ever deleted something out of anger (like your ex-girlfriend’s pictures)? No hands? Well, if you don’t want to admit it haven’t done it, you will need the program Undelete Plus in case you ever do it in the future.

Undelete Plus is a free file recovery utility that easily brings back those files that somehow got lost or ended up deleted by some random occurrence.

Undelete Plus is an extremely easy to use program. After you install it and open it up, Undelete Plus will automatically detect the hard drives on your computer. Select the drive that has the lost files on it, and click the Start Scan button.

My 80 GB harddrive was scanned in just a few minutes, but it returned over 4,000 files. When did I delete 4,000 files? This could get ugly really quickly.

Needle in a Haystack

My idea of fun is not sorting through over 4,000 files to find that one report due in a few hours that I accidentally deleted. The best feature of Undelete Plus, besides the whole undeleting part, is its ability to filter your deleted files. This makes the searching process much less painful.

You can filter files by type, folder and drive. This provides a great start, but even if I filter it down to images, I still have a couple hundred images to choose from. Undelete Plus allows you to also sort the files by filename, path, status, size, date created and date modified. After a quick filter and sort, you should be able to quickly find the file you want to restore.

I selected around 20 files and clicked the Start Undelete button to hopefully bring my files back from the dead. The process was surprisingly fast, as after only a few seconds, I had zombie files all over my desktop. All 20 of the files that were selected popped up on the desktop.

Conclusion

Undelete Plus performed as advertised. It was an easy to use program that quickly brought back my once lost files. However, I must say that my sample of 20 files is a very small one in the grand scheme of things and may not be fully representative.

Another alternative is Restoration which was written about by Mark, last September.

What does everyone out there use to get back those precious files that accidentally go the way of the dinosaur, and how has your success rate been on the file resurrection front?