A data recovery tool limited to pictures, videos, and music for $10 more than Undelete Wizard? Read our test report to find out whether Media Recovery Wizard is worth its premium!
| Author: | WizardRecovery Company |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Date: | 04/12/2010 |
| Size: | 3912 kb |
| License: | Shareware |
| Price: | $49.95 |
| Platform: | WinXP Windows2000 Windows2003 Windows Vista Ultimate Windows Vista Windows 7 |
A Wizard to Recover Music and Videos
Yet another addition to the class of specialized data recovery tools, Media Recovery Wizard is dedicated to recovering pictures, audio and video files such as MP3, AVI, OGG and whatnot. Limited to multimedia files only, this tool costs $10 more than the companyís bargain of the century, Undelete Wizard. Is the premium worth paying? Read our review to find out.
Background
Losing a complete photo session because of a memory card failure or accidental reformatting of the flash card is a pity. Trying to recover a set of wedding videos from a failed hard drive is a different matter. Yet, the two problems have one thing in common: the solution. General-use or specialized data recovery programs can be used to extract pictures, music and video from the damaged media.
The advantages to general-use data recovery tools such as Undelete Wizard are many. They are generally affordable, they work reliably, and they support all other file formats as well, allowing you to recover an occasional deleted document, ZIP archive, or just about anything else. Yet, there are still multiple offerings on the market in regards to multimedia-specific recovery. Is this just a marketing gimmick, or do they really handle a specific subset of files better than general-use recovery tools?
Not Just Recovery
The company making Media Recovery Wizard dedicated the product to the recovery of pictures, music, and videos in virtually all popular formats, and some exotic ones as well. The tool comes equipped with the companyís signature file recovery technology, PowerSearch, that enables Media Recovery Wizard to scan the entire surface of the disk or the contents of a memory card being recovered in order to locate and restore all supported files. Media Recovery Wizard passed our usual recovery test with flying colors, considering its quite limited scope of multimedia files only.
However, thereís more to recovering multimedia files than undeleting. Itís a pity to undelete a gigabyte worth of video only to find out it wonít play in a media player and wonít open in a video editor. Or opens and plays back, but with multiple defects in the video stream. The possibility of such damage is high due to the sheer size of the thing.
Media Recovery Wizard is able to repair the damage by carefully reconstructing the entire video file. It analyzes fileís headers, recalculates frames, and makes sure that everything is in sync. It does all that in real time. Literally, Media Recovery Wizard reconstructs the entire media stream in about the same time other tools need to just undelete it!
Supported Formats
Media Recovery Wizard supports a wide variety of still images, video and audio formats. MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV, OGG, WV, RA, RM, VQF, MID and VOC audio formats, RAW images in CR2, CRW, RAW, TIFF, TIF, NEF, PEF, and X3F formats, videos in AVI, WMV, MPG, ASF, MP1, M1V, MP2, M2V, M2A, VOB, DAT, MV, and MOV formats, as well as pictures in JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF, and many others are supported.
Pre-Recovery Preview
Typical for good data recovery tools, Media Recovery Wizard comes with pre-recovery preview available in its paid and free versions. The preview is able to reconstruct corrupted files on-the-fly, making it possible to preview recoverable files even if they are damaged, but repairable.
Conclusion
Media Recovery Wizard comes at a $10 premium over the companyís great Undelete Wizard. Yet, if you need to recover large videos or a set of valuable pictures, Media Recovery Wizard is a much better tool to use. For under $50, itís a recommended solution to this kind of troubles.
The best of Flash disk recovery:
- DiskInternals Flash Recovery 2.6
- Digital Photo Recovery 1.15.7
- SoftAmbulance Photo Undelete 1.7
- PhotoRec 6.10
- Flash File Recovery 1.9
