Before recovering data you should properly find and open volume. The result of recovery depends on results of the previous volume search and what volume is opened.
Attention! Do not recover to the same partition which contains source data to recover. It is highly recommended to recover files and data to another physical device. You may recover to another partition of the same device only if you are sure that source and destination partitions don't overlap and device has no physical damages. Do not load system or run program from the partition where data to recover is located.
To recover all found files (including lost and removed files and NTFS altstreams) you should open virtual directory [All Found] in the File Panel. This is also required for correct item unselecting during group recovery.
Free Edition does not support file group and directory recovery. Free Edition may allow recovering files in the current panel (include search panel) if there are no more than 4000 files after size is calculated.
Calculate size of the data to recover. Global indicator of recovery process is working if the size is calculated. You should not calculate the size to avoid unnecessary device load on devices with bad sectors.
Save list of files selected for recovery to a file.
Recover files marked as "deleted" (see File Panel). If the option is not selected "deleted" files won't be recovered regardless the selection state.
Recover files marked as "found" (see File Panel). If the option is not checked "found" files won't be recovered regardless the selection state.
The option is selected if the OS supports recovering paths containing special or national symbols which does not included in limited ANSI set.
Save recovery report to a file. List files and directories, log file I/O errors, calculate checksums CRC32, MD5, SHA1.
Recover NTFS alternate data streams (Alt. stream name and file name are separated by a colon, i.e. FileName:StreamName).
FAT volumes does not support files greater then 4 Gb (or sometimes 2 Gb). So it is not possible to recover larger files to a FAT volumes. Large files will be splitted during recovery (upon request). You can manually merge file parts using system utility copy /b part1 + part2 + part3 result, for example. Pure DOS supports only FAT volumes.
Without special drivers long files names are not supported under DOS. Option Substitute names allows name substitution during recovery. File LRENAME.BAT is being created in the destination folder for backward renaming. To restore original file names load OS Windows, go to the destination folder and execute file LRENAME.BAT. An appropriate OEM code page must be selected when working in DOS in order to restore national symbols correctly. Unicode symbols outside the selected code page will be transliterated or substituted.
In order to recover paths which are longer than 259 symbols you should manually prepend the destination directory name with a prefix \\?\, e.g.: \\?\C:\. Such long paths may be inaccessible for standard programs such as Explorer (My Computer).
During recovery there may be name duplicates due to finding different versions of the same file, different links to the same file, or due to erroneous merging of directories.
If a file or directory with the same name is being recovered there is a query where you can choose how to handle the duplicates. It is possible to rename the object manually by entering name or to choose auto renaming or skipping all subsequent objects. It is also possible to merge directories with same names.
There is a threshold number of renaming for a single object after which there will be a second query for a desired action for the case of threshold achieving. Parameters maxfilerenames and maxdirrenames of ini-file are used as threshold numbers by default.
Determining name duplicates is working on the base of destination file system. Name handling is not working if name substitution is used under DOS.