Lost & Found is not a box under the counter at the store, it is data recovery software. Powerquest has made disk/data utility programs for a number of years and this is another facet of the field. Partition Magic and Disk Copy made formerly difficult tasks easy for everyday users. Resizing and moving partitions used to be a difficult task, now a few clicks and it is done automatically. Lost & Found adds another tool to the Non-Power Users toolbox. Data Recovery was a mythical process, remove the hard drive and send it to a company (usually far, far away) and they would recover your data, or as much as they could. Time was a major problem, it could takes days or even weeks, cost was prohibitive, Hundreds of dollars was not uncommon, and there was no guarantee it would work. The past few years have brought software that would recover lost data to the smaller tech support area, but it too was expensive, $100 or more per use. Now with Lost & Found you maybe able to get your information back for under $70 dollars.

What can you recover, files located on damaged partitions, that other programs couldn't seem to recover. Files from partitions that may have been deleted, whether on purpose or by a malicious virus. Drives that have had a disk crash, but are still spinning may have made the data inaccessible, because the FAT (File Allocation Table) is damaged or nonexistent.

How It Works
It works well, I had gotten this program when I had no problems to try it out with, but time solved that dilemma. I had a drive crash and needed some files since the last backup. I opened the box and regretted not using the Backup features of the software, it would have made finding all the files much easier, but that was no deterrence to Lost & Found. It works off of two diskettes, and does not have to be installed on the hard drive (which was not working anyway). Once loaded there are so simple steps and few decisions to be made, the most important of which is where do you want to store the restored files. If you are only looking for a small file a floppy may do it, but usually you will need either another hard drive or a Zip or LS120 drive (make sure you have boot disks to access these removable media). After chugging, and I do mean chugging away for a while, you are presented with a list of recoverable files. Either getting them all or some of them is up to you. The recovery process takes a while too.

Did It Work?
Yes and no, I got most of the files I needed to get, but some of the larger files were said to be recovered but were missing a few parts I guess, because they were unusable. The files that were recovered went up to about 7mb, and the failed ones were about 30mb and more. I was happy and back at work.

Benefits
You do not need to have Lost & Found before the problem. If you have a crash and can't get the data restored, go buy it and use it. Low cost is another benefit. Lost & Found does not change your drive, it will only read from it and therefore leaves it the way it found it, in case another method of recovery is needed. While not full of pretty pictures it is user friendly.

What It Won't Do
If your drive is not spinning it will not work, it has to be able to read the scrambled data. You may want to think twice before trying a different recovery method that does write to the drive, such as Norton Disk Doctor. You may scramble the drive a little more, and while most likely will not prevent recovery, it can extend the time it takes. With Lost & Found being so nice as to not change the drive, you might as well try it first. And with that we have:

Good News
There is a demo version of Lost & Found available from powerquest. This version will show you what files it can restore, but will not actually restore anything. You will have to purchase the full version to restore the files. So you can find out your answers with no expense wasted.

Final Comment
I have used the more expensive recovery software and while they are more powerful and offer other options, Lost & Found is a fine package. Data recovery can be very stressful and using this made it easy if not time consuming.