File Scavenger® Version 5 is a file 'undelete' and data recovery utility for Windows® 8, 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP and 2000. File Scavenger® can recover files that have been accidentally deleted (including files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down) provided that recovery is attempted before the files are permanently overwritten by new data. File Scavenger® supports both basic and dynamic disks, NTFS compression, alternate data streams, sparse files, Unicode filenames, etc. Except in severe cases, both the file and the folder path leading to the file can be recovered.

File Scavenger® can also recover files from a reformatted or corrupted volume even when the volume has been deleted and its original position and size are unknown. File Scavenger® can scan an entire physical hard drive to look for traces of defunct volumes.

File Scavenger® uses advanced algorithms to handle disks with bad sectors and badly corrupted partitions. It can be installed on a hard drive or run from a portable storage device such as a memory card, removable drive, or CD. To run File Scavenger®, you must log on as a system administrator to the computer where data recovery is intended.

Files can only be restored if the disk areas allocated to the files have not been overwritten by new data. All recovered files should be validated for the integrity of the recovered data.

Features

Improved support for hard drives with 4K sector size.

The 64-bit version removes the limit on the number of files the program can scan, provided that sufficient physical memory is available. The 32-bit version can scan no more than about ten million files.

Handling disk number changes when loading a session file. Windows assigns a disk number to a physical drive, such as 'Disk 1', 'Disk 2', etc. Older versions of File Scavenger cannot load a session file if the disk numbers have changed.

New option to create a log for a long scan. The log can be used in a subsequent rescan to significantly reduce scan time.

Improved recovery of PDF documents in raw mode. In previous versions raw PDF documents are sequentially numbered and saved in a flat folder. In version 5 they are arranged by author and date with the document title as the filename.

Improved ZFS and RAIDZ recovery. ZFS is a new file system used primarily by FreeNAS devices.