Diskeeper Emergency Undelete review

While not an everyday occurrence, accidental file deletion can be devastating. Thankfully, when you delete a file it is not physically removed from your hard disk. Instead, the physical space filled by the file is flagged as available should Windows need somewhere to put something, and until that time the original file remains intact.

Diskeeper Emergency Undelete – previously available as part of the more comprehensive Undelete 2009 package – is a small application that allows you to search drives or folders for deleted files and, where possible, restore them. The search dialogue is basic but functional and accepts wildcards to widen your search parameters. It needn’t have been installed before the deletion occurred, but to have the greatest chance of recovery you should stop using your computer as soon as you discover your erroneous deletion. This minimises the risk of overwriting your newly deleted files. As such, Emergency Undelete should be run directly from a CD, external drive or separate partition to avoid the irony of rendering your freshly deleted files unrecoverable by overwriting them with the software. The program doesn’t need to be installed and can be run directly from its folder, so we recommend keeping a copy on a USB flash drive.

The chances of successful recovery depend to a large extent on post-deletion computer activity. However, we also found that files that had passed through the Recycle Bin before being purged were less reliably recovered than those that had been permanently deleted directly (using shift-delete) or removed using a third-party application such as a photo organiser or music player. This is a significant disadvantage given that Windows places deleted files in the Recycle Bin by default.

Unlike the full Undelete package, Emergency Undelete does not offer any pre-emptive measures to avoid data loss – such as automatically saving a backup of files deleted from network shares. Instead, its job begins once the damage has been done. If you have accidently deleted files, Emergency Undelete may be worth a try, but we can’t guarantee success in recovering your data.