Recover4all

It may be shareware but at under $30 US who is going to argue at the price. One  piece of bad news is that the demo of Recover4All is essentially useless in that it will only recover files up to 10K. If you've lost your data, or an important file it is likely Recover4All will allow you to restore it. It works quickly and quite effectively. I have used both this program and RecoverNT and find  Recover4All to be a lot simpler to use (not mentioning the price). RecoverNT is a more powerful program and will recover files from reformatted disks but it costs $295 US. After all I really just need a recovery program to bail me out when I've made a mistake.

Two important points need to be made here about recovery programs:

1) Recovery programs can only recover what is there. If you have written to the drive after you have deleted, it is likely that you may have overwritten a segment of the file and made the recovered file unusable. For this reason it is better to have a copy of the Recovery program stored on a floppy for use rather than to download it onto your hard drive, install it and then try the recovery. Do so will likely overwrite files you need to restore.

2) To recover a deleted file you need to recover it to a different drive than the one it was deleted from. Basically you need to have more than one drive to do any recovery. Another option is to partition your hard drive and then you can restore to another partition. However the bad news is if you have just deleted your files you don't want to create a partition now else it is likely that your lost files will be lost for good. Smaller files, under 1.44 K can be restored to a floppy. If you only have one HD you will need to get the hardware or go to a professional service to try to gain it back 8^(

Notice that I have created a folder called 0001 Recovery and have this on both my C: and D: drives. In that way I have a folder that I can quickly recover a file from either drive to.

Download Recover4All here

If your needs are greater then
Phoenix Software Systems sells Recover-It-All  or use the  link to RecoverNT check.