MediaHeal for Flash is yet another data recovery tool manufactured by Recoveronix, the company that brought us utterly disappointing MediaHeal for Hard Drives. Is MediaHeal for Flash any better, and how does it fare against competition?
A Word on Flash Recovery Tools
With SSD drives gaining popularity, growth of the size and speed of commercially available flash memory cards and USB drives and dramatic decrease in prices per gigabyte of storage capacity led to more and more users relying on those devices to keep their important information. Many users will only have a single copy of their files, documents and pictures held on a single memory stick. If that stick fails, and they do fail from time to time for a variety of reasons or for no apparent reason at all, they’re stuck.
Demand for dedicated flash recovery tools led supply. Different companies took different approaches when trying to fulfill the demand. Some manufacturers (like DiskInternals) simply re-branded their regular recovery products into something having a word “Flash” in the name.While it may seem awkward, there’s no principle difference in recovering information from hard drives and solid-state media, at least from the point of view of software running on top of the drivers that communicate with the flash device (and we’re yet to see a single driver-mode data recovery tool for the consumer market).
Other manufacturers release genuinely different versions of their data recovery tools that can (or, rather, will) handle solid-state drives exclusively. In most cases (in fact, that’d be all tools that’s been through our lab to the moment) the limitation is just that – a simple lock in the program preventing it from recovering data from non-flash media. Again, tools such as Diskinternals Flash Recovery don’t have the lock, offering essentially the same functionality as their regular recovery tool.
Which brings us to MediaHeal for Flash. The tool is distinctly different from all other tools offered by the company, so we test it in hope to see if it’s any different than its lacklusterMediaHeal for Hard Drives.
Performance
MediaHeal for Flash offers an extremely basic, Spartan user interface. A window with a folder tree, list of files, and two buttons. No wizards. No pre-recovery preview. No toolbars. None of the usual bells and whistles.Unfortunately, there’s no performance either. While MediaHeal for Flash was able to list and recover some freshly deleted files on a healthy memory card, it failed miserably when presented a formatted one, displaying a completely blank window that should’ve had the file list. Mildly put, we were very surprised. Apparently, there’s no signature-search algorithm of any kind in this tool.
A Word on Formatted Media
Note that, while MediaHeal for Flashshould’ve been able to recover files from formatted disks and memory cards, completing a full format of a hard disk overwrites all data stored on the disk, and makes files completely unrecoverable. Quick format, full format of a memory card performed by digital cameras, or interrupted full format of a disk leave you some chances, so it’s always worth a try.
Value
Pricing for MediaHeal for Hard Drives starts at $49, yet, performance-wise, it’s simply not there. We’ve seen free data recovery tools doing much better than this. Simply put: stay away at any cost, and that’s not just our opinion: it’s a given fact. Get a fine general-use data recovery tool such as Handy Recovery ($49) or Diskinternals Uneraser ($39), or invest in Diskinternals Flash Recovery ($49) if you must have something flashy, and you’ll be surprised at how far a quality flash recovery tool can bring you.
Features
- Supposed to work with a variety of memory cards
- User interface for the Spartans among us
Drawbacks
- Doesn’t work, period