FileRestore looks and behaves like the file search feature built into Windows, except that instead of searching for regular files it searches for deleted files. To locate all deleted files on a selected drive press the Search Now button or select Search Now from the File menu without entering any search parameters. You can narrow the search in several ways -
To see only those files with names that meet your specifications, enter the criteria in Search for files named:. Note that FileRestore supports multiple uses of the wildcard characters (*) and (?) in the search parameters.
To search on any of multiple file name criteria, separate the criteria by a space ( ), comma (,), or semicolon (;). For example, to find various types of text files you might enter the criteria *.txt;*.csv;*.tab;*.asc.
To include files in the search that may have been part of deleted directories check Search for files in deleted directories.
You may also narrow the search by specifying a date range in Last modified or a size range in Size between.
After you specify any search parameters and the search location press the Search Now button.
You can sort your search results by clicking on the appropriate column heading. For example, to order files by size click on the Size heading; to group files by type click on the Type heading.
To save a summary of your search results press the Copy file list to Clipboard button and paste the Clipboard contents into a document or spreadsheet.
Notes
FileRestore attempts to determine whether each deleted file is recoverable and reports the result in the Recoverability column. If a file is marked Likely it means that none of the file's data is known to be overwritten by other files. However, this is only an estimate of the files condition, and it is possible that even a file marked Likely will contain corrupt data. In general the longer the time since a file has been deleted the less likely that it can be recovered.
When searching for files on FAT or FAT32 volumes the first letter of the file name cannot always be retrieved. For this reason FileRestore displays files that match all characters entered in Search for files named, as well as those matching all characters but the first. Whenever the first letter cannot be retrieved it is replaced by the question mark character (?) when displayed and by an underscore (_) when the file is copied to a new location.
If a file is found but it cannot be determined which directory it belongs to (usually because the parent directory is also deleted) then it is placed in a directory labeled ...Unknown Folder #.... It is possible for there to be multiple orphan directories, each corresponding to a different directory that no longer exists.