This is a paid review. Get Reviewed by this blog for $60 at ReviewMe!
Money can be recovered, lost ground can be recovered too, but time can't be recovered, and when you are losing data from a hard drive, if that data can't be retrieved, you may lose more than just time and money. Anyway, when everything seems lost, if you are lucky enough, you may run into a program just like the one we have here today, called Zero Assumption Recovery, or just ZAR.
Zero Assumption Recovery comes in a small setup package that has only 2.3MB in size, so you won't get old while waiting for the download to finish. This program can save your data when everything else seem to fail, because of its raw data reading techniques used, and - just like most of its competitors - offers a free trial for new users.
The current version of this 7 year old software is 8.2, and installing it is a piece of cake, but using it may become troublesome for most beginners. Well, probably I won't be able to bring a ray of light to those people and show them the tips and tricks they need to get everything possible out of ZAR, but I'll try to show everyone what can be done with this program.
First of all, this program's interface seems a bit outdated, but I must admit it wasn't hard to find my way around. I said "my way", and this doesn't mean that "your way" is going to be as easy...but I am sure that most people will get the job done, at least at the basic level. Let's see...
Once the program opens, there are two windows to be taken care of - the main window, and the Runtime Control. The last one has some useful settings, such as Bad Sector Handling and Disk Cache settings. If you don't have any idea what these mean, just press the "Explain" button and you'll get all the info you need. I know that some of you may consider it boring, but don't forget that information is power, so you'd better stick your nose into that help file if you're not sure what you're doing!
Before trying to recover any data, taking a look into the Advanced Configuration area would be a good choice, so press the Advanced Configuration button on the main window. My favorite option here is the one that allows you to set the program to stop recovery automatically if your hard drive temperature exceeds a certain limit, but there are a lot of useful options here. Now that I told you about this, let's see how do you get on track with a data recovery task...
First, press the Next button inside the main window. Now, simply choose the type of recovery task you have in mind - simple volume or a functional RAID, broken RAID or images from the digital camera memory card (it is a great thing to have this feature included, because so far I have seen only a couple of data recovery programs with all these three options together).
Now, choose the right hard drive and press Next again. Once you pushed that button, things begin to become clearer... or not. Right click one of the available partitions and look at the options - you can create an image of your partition, or search for missing ones. Remember these, you may need them one day!
While scanning, the program displays the CPU load, read speed, read cache occupied and temperature of the drive. When errors occur, the program simply delivers an error and exits, and I must say this is not what I expect, but that's life...
You can't always get what you want, but some of my friends had a lot of success using this program. It would be really nice to test ZAR with a RAID matrix or a digital card, but I don't have any of these at hand now, so I'll leave them to you. Since it's a read only recovery program, you can't damage your data at all, so let's leave this and move to the conclusions now, shall we?
The Good
ZAR is a powerful data recovery solution for all the frequent issues that can happen to home users, and even for system administrators and computer engineers. While allowing advanced, in depth data retrieval, quick image recovery from memory cards or data recovery from hard drives is also available.
The bad
Priced at 100$, this program may not be a worthy choice for most home users that won't use it on a regular basis, especially since most advanced options require some knowledge in the field.
Conclusion
Your family pictures are priceless, but that doesn't mean you have to pay a few times the value of your hard drive to recover them when your drive happens to crash. Of course that no matter how important is to backup data on a regular basis, a lot of us forgot to do it, so take your time to try ZAR now and learn how to use it.
The ball is in your court now, you have the knowledge you need, so decide and do what should be done! Good luck and keep your data safe... or recover it successfully with ZAR!
This is a paid review. Get Reviewed by this blog for $60 at ReviewMe!
Screenshots
Post new comment