Pandora Corporation is doing its part to put an end to verbal abuse toward personal computers.

The company released free data recovery software called Pandora Recovery.

“As computers now run almost everyone’s everyday life, more and more mistakes are bound to happen,” said James Leasure, founder of Pandora Corp. “These mistakes can become more and more damaging.”

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Whether someone deleted a file thought to be unnecessary, a computer crashes in the middle of a report, or if a virus attacks the system, Pandora Recovery is designed to keep a computer owner protected.

The program scans the hard drive and builds an index of both existing and deleted files and directories. Once the scan is complete, the user has full control over which files to recover and what destination to recover them to. Also, the program allows users to preview deleted image and text files without performing the full recovery.

“We wanted to create a program that would recover as much as possible for our users,” Leasure said. “It can recover not only regular files, but also archived, hidden, system, sparse, encrypted and compressed files.”

When a file is deleted, the disk space once occupied by the file is set to be reused by file system. The file system reallocates the space for data of newly created files. Once completed, the deleted file becomes partially or completely overwritten.

“In reality, nothing is deleted,” said Bojan Gajic, Pandora’s chief technical officer. “You are just telling the computer ‘Ok, I don’t need this space anymore, you can use it for something else now.’ It’s really just the PC recycling its memory.”

It becomes increasingly difficult to recover a file that has been or is being overwritten. The programmers of Pandora Recovery hoped to aid users by having a full display of file properties, which includes an estimate of recovery success, according to Leasure.

Pandora Recovery requires Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server or Windows Vista for installation. The program is available as a free download at www.pandorarecovery.com/download. There are no plans at this time for a version compatible with Mac, Linux or other non-Microsoft operating systems.

“It is not a program you will use everyday,” Leasure said. “But when you need it, you will be glad you have it.”

Joe Pangburn

Inside Tucson Business

Contact Joe Pangburn by e-mail at jpangburn@azbiz.com or call (520) 295-4259.

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