Network Undelete 1.0 Review

The situation is desperate. The chief executive has accidentally deleted her presentation to the Board – and you, as the Network Administrator are summoned from your troglodyte existence in the basement to the 100 th floor. Can you help? Indeed, you can! And with Network Undelete from Executive Software,you can perform the required miracle without moving from behind your pile of empty pizza boxes.

NT already has an undelete facility. The Recycle Bin is where all files deleted from the Explorer end up ready to be reclaimed. However, it has its limitations. First, not everything is sent to the Recycle Bin – deleting from the NT command prompt, for example, is somewhat irreversible. And secondly, you can’t manage a Recycle Bin remotely from an administrator workstation.

Network Undelete expands the functions of the Recycle Bin considerably. All files can be recovered whether even if they were deleted by from the command prompt. Also, you can specify multiple recycle bins for each partition on a machine or choose a common recovery bin for all partitions on that machine.

But even better, you can specify which files you want kept so that you aren’t cluttering up your Recycle Bin with useless temporary or scratch files. You can specify entire directories and subdirectory trees to be excluded from the recovery process. So, for example, a directory which is exclusively used for the preparation of reports can be ignored. Because the Recovery Bin (Network Undelete’s name for the modified Recycle Bin) doesn’t get filled with rubbish, files that you might want to recover hang around for longer. You can set other properties of the Recovery Bin as well – the maximum percentage of the disk to use for the Bin and also whether to disable the Recovery Bin when it gets full or, alternatively, purge it.

Network Undelete comes in two flavours, the basic Client version which runs standalone on an NT Workstation and the Administrator which allows you to connect to an NT workstation (where the client Network Undelete has been installed) and undelete files remotely. It’s really this feature that will appeal to network administrators and help desks. You can earn the eternal gratitude of a network user by restoring a file while he or she is still on the phone.

There’s another very handy utility for getting files back – even when they’ve really been zapped. The ‘Undelete From Disk’ feature can potentially get files back that have been purged from the Recovery Bin or deleted when the Recovery Bin wasn’t in use. In practice, it was fast and highly efficient at trawling over my hard disks. So much so, that you may find that issues of confidentiality may arise – how do you know when a personnel file or medical report, say, has been ‘deleted’ or is in fact quite recoverable? One feature that Executive software might like to add in future release is a file ‘washing’ facility that really does remove all information from a file.

Finally, there’s another feature of Network Undelete – the Emergency Undelete utility. This comes into play if you’ve deleted something important but haven’t installed Network Undelete. In this situation it’s an unfortunate fact that installing any recovery software may have the effect of overwriting the file you can to recover. Emergency Undelete tries to minimise this by only installing 8KB of software on your hard disk. You then run the main program from the CD, using it in more or less the same way as the Undelete From Disk utility.

Overall, you may find Network Undelete to be a valuable recovery tool for use on a standalone or network basis. And even if your dream of getting a huge bonus for rescuing the boss’s presentation never happens, you may well find your status among your users to be considerably enhanced.

Product Facts :

Product: Network Undelete 1.0
Publisher: Executive Software
Publisher WWW:
Distributor: Ingram Micro
Tel: 01908 260160
Distributor WWW: www.ingrammicro.co.uk
Price: Network Undelete single client £41 inc. VAT;
single administrator £165 inc. VAT;
5-pack client £165 inc. VAT;
5-pack administrator £582 inc. VAT.
Volume discounts available.
Minimum requirements: Windows NT 4.0 Server or Workstation
Available on: CD
Reviewed On: NT 4 SBS, twin 133MHz Intel processors, 96 MB memory


PC Plus verdict:

PC Plus verdict................................... 8
For ...................................................... an excellent undelete utility
Against............................................... and anything you have deleted may be used in evidence …
Range of features............................... 8
Ease of use......................................... 9
Value for money................................. 8
Overall speed..................................... 9
Documentation................................... 8

return to: www.execsoft.co.uk