Criteria for the unerase tools

The unerase tools have been evaluated by the following criteria:

• Efficiency - how many deleted files have been recovered with two possible outcomes: Good - if all deleted files have been restored and Bad - if some files were not recovered.
• Ease of use - here we took into account how easy it is to select a drive or a partition for the recovery and whether additional configuration is needed to launch a standard mode of the recovery.
• Speed - means how quickly the recovered files appeared. The tools were compared with each other.
• Preview/prediction - we took into account whether a tool has a capability to provide information about quality of the recovery for a file before copying - a preview option or prediction data.
• Raw recovery - we tested whether the unerase tools are capable of doing raw recovery.
• Price - we took prices from the official sites of the unerase tool vendors.

In our test we used an NTFS-formatted partition 14 GB in size. First we deleted several files from the partition, launched all the unerase tools one by one to recover these files.

Then we tested the capability of the tools to work with a large number of deleted files. To do so we copied two million .gif and .txt files to the partition (one million of each type). Then these files were deleted and the partition was used in our test.