Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Pandora

Nov 8, 2010 9:44AM PST

I wanted to ask if anyone else has used Pandora Recovery software? A few months back, I used it on a laptop when volunteering in the college computer lab. A woman brought in her laptop and needed files recovered. To my surprise, this recovered her files, her son's files who owned it before her, and the friend her son bought the laptop from.

So tonight, I decided to try and recover my media off a 200 gig Maxtor drive. My son had it before me, and prior, it was our backup network drive. Anyway, I ran Pandora on it a couple of hours ago, and surprisingly, it recovered items from 3 years ago. Let me note: this drive has been formatted numerous times, even had OS installs, etc... on it's last leg I assure you but still going.

Of all the free or some paid for recovery tools I've used, I am most impressed by this one. The files were not just recovered to a point, they actually worked, music, documents, pictures, all in perfect condition. Normally I scoff at most free recovery tools, not this time. So yes, it's more than my opinion, I have proof it works, sitting in my recovery folder.

So, has anyone else used this? If so, what's your opinion? For a free recovery tool, I think it's great. LINKY...

http://www.pandorarecovery.com/

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Not tried it myself
Nov 9, 2010 7:24PM PST

but it certainly looks interesting.

One to add to the arsenal I think.

Mark

- Collapse -
yes
Nov 12, 2010 5:17PM PST

and yes it works quite well for a free application

I had accidentally deleted files from my pc and realized it about 30 minutes later, this on my typical house cleaning day for the pc. So off to google.com i went and saw some that seemed like they would be ok, but you need to pay after X MB of recovery, so that wasn't going to work as i had GBs of music files.
gave it a shot and they were recovered, this after i had been writing files to disk during the prior week

You might want get a tool from heidi software, product called eraser, works great for permanent file deletion, great in an office where things need to be destroyed periodically. I typically use that app to erase "free space." The reason i use it is also a method to test the drive mechanics and signal strength of the media. In the past if the magnetic domains became weak it could lead to premature "death" of sectors, so as a precaution i just use it make sure all is well

- Collapse -
Epicness
Oct 31, 2011 2:07AM PDT

I had a client who found their old recovery discs and did a complete reinstall and lost all of their files. I was just looking around to see what options I had and stumbled across this thread. And I'll wager a weeks pay that you can guess what happened with this program. The program not only found all of the files she had deleted but a list of files she had wondered what had happened to them. The user is not computer literate and had deleted an entire folder of files. Thank you for bringing up this program on a thread. It is an amazing tool!!!