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I got an email from WinRecovery, denying my assumptions below. Their email is appended. Kudos to them for reacting reasonably.
I was sitting amid five computers, staring at my screen in shock. I had just realized that a few minutes ago I had deleted my last copy of personal photos on my harddisks. The last tape backup was at least a year old, so I had just lost one year of photos, basically the whole time I'd spent in Berlin. Then it dawned on me that one copy might still reside on one of the harddisks in its deleted form. So I started looking for an undelete program to get back my precious photos.
I quickly found one and downloaded it. Sure enough, the undelete program found my photos in good health---not surprisingly, since after emptying the Windows Recycle Bin, not much had happened on that harddisk. I clicked recover, hoping to be able to view my photos again in a few minutes. A window popped up informing me that I had to buy a license to make use of the recovery functionality. I was somewhat taken aback that I couldn't even use the program once before having to buy a license, but so what I thought, the program will provide a good service and after all, it can't be charging that much, maybe $5, maybe $10 at max.
The program took me to its website. It turned out one license cost $50. Gee, I thought, what a ridiculous price. Haven't they heard that competition for a simple standardizable service like this should drive down prices? So I abandoned the website and downloaded some other undelete programs, some commercial ones, some free. Prices ranged from zero to $30. Strangely, however, none of these other programs could find my files! I went back to the first undelete program I had used, WinRecovery's WinUndelete program. And there they were, my photos in all their glory, but in a different directory under slightly different name.
I don't know for sure, but I think WinUndelete, being the first program to get to my files, changed the data on the harddisk so that only it could recover these files. It seems implausible to me that four other undelete programs wouldn't work---after all, they were obviously providing a living to their developers and their companies. If I was living in the U.S. I would have appealed to the Better Business Bureau as I think this is a case of extortion if not outright blackmail.
So I bit the bullet and paid the $50 bucks. Adding insult to injury, WinRecovery charged me an additional $3.50 for storing my registration code on their servers, even though I had explicitly unmarked that option. (Probably, a second before I clicked ok, they had amended their "Protect your purchase with our Registration Key Protection Service!" with a "Not!" or something.)
Whoa, this company's business model is high up on my list of unsavory software business models. Scavengers, riding other people's misery to their financial gain.
Hello Dirk,
I'm from WinRecovery Software, the company offering WinUndelete.
I searched our product name in Google and found your blog page regarding WinUndelete (http://www.riehle.org/blogs/personal/2005/2005-08-28.html). I think there may be some mis-understandings.
1. WinUndelete doesn't perform write operation on your source drive, and it doesn't modify, remove, move or re-name your original deleted files on the hard drive. It's guaranteed. I think in your case, MS Windows may write temporary data frequently to hard drive, which may cause the overwriting, or if you installed some other tools e.g. Norton Anti-virus, they may change the deleted files names. It's really a bad practice IF WinUndelete removes/modifies them after scan to avoid other similar tools to find/recover them - we don't do that. If you don't believe it, you may test it on some removable storage where the deleted files are not affected by Windows temporary files.
2. The registration key insurance service option isn't provided and charged by us. It's by our order processor - RegSoft. Actually we cannot even control it. You may find other software products handled by RegSoft has the same option. It's optional but we're really sorry for it. You may forward us your order id and we will try to ask RegSoft to refund the $3.99 if you chose the option by mistake. You may request registration key resending from us free in the future if needed.
Customer's satisfaction is very important to us. If you have any further questions or problems, please feel free to let us know.
Leon Ren
WinRecovery Software
WinUndelete - Professional Undelete Software for MS Windows
http://www.winrecovery.com
E-mail: support@winrecovery.com
Toll-Free Fax: 1-866-691-8331
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