How can you lose files? Windows has had a recycle bin for years and you'd have to be pretty stupid to drop a file in the bin and empty it before realising the file was important, wouldn't you?

No. In fact you don't have to be stupid at all: just rushed, tired or distracted. The same goes for repartitioning a hard drive or migrating data from one drive to another. You've only got to be off guard for a few seconds to consign important data to oblivion.

Except that it's not really oblivion. Windows can't be bothered to scrub a whole area of a hard drive, even when you reformat it, and instead just knocks the first character off the filename and removes the entry from its file directory. Just because Windows has forgotten about it, doesn't mean the file's gone. BHV's Recover My Files proves this, by displaying and then bringing deleted and lost files back to life.

The program has a neat, file-manager-style view, with a Wizard overlaid, so you can select the kind of search you want. There are two types of searches: a Fast one for recently deleted files and a more thorough Complete one, which tries to reconstruct lost files directly from the hard disk surface. There are also Fast and Complete options for reconstituting mistakenly formatted drives.

Within the search options, you can restrict searches to specific logical drives and select the files to search for, either in groups - like graphics, e-mails or documents - or individually, by file type. Settings are remembered from search to search.

During our tests, the program stalled trying to analyse one particular file on our test PC, each time we ran a Complete search. We left it for over 90 minutes in case it was struggling with a large file, but it couldn't resolve the problem. A 'Skip file' function would have been useful, but the only button available was Stop. Running a Complete search on a 40GB drive in a different PC went through without problem and the program found over 74,000 files, nearly all text snippets, in 30 minutes.

The program only took three minutes to complete a Fast search of our original, 80GB drive. Recover My Files found over 3,600 deleted files, though many had been overwritten since deletion and were therefore unrecoverable. The program can preview many of the most popular filetypes, including graphics and text files, so you can decide more easily if you need to reinstate them.

Recover My Files is invaluable when you need it, but you're not likely to need it often. There's a question mark over its ability to always finish a Complete search, but other than that, it performs well and could be the only lifeline you have for invaluable, inadvertently lost data.