BadCopy Pro 3.81 Review

I don't know how lucky were you with floppies, but I will alsways remember the floppy disks as a storage nightmare. I am not talking about their price/MB ratio or their size, since reliability is the first thing I have in mind most of the time. I would sacrifice money and performance to get a product that I can trust, but I wouldn't ever go the other way around.

Despite the technological improvements, even memory cards or Flash drives today can lose data, and I am not talking in theory here. Once, I had the occasion to witness a SD memory card "dying" after less than 2 months of use. Of course, the shop replaced it with a new one, and the pictures were - fortunately - recovered using a specialized program, one similar to BadCopy Pro, the application I am going to review now.

Setup

BadCopy Pro has reached version 3.81, and its trial version can be run for ages, because it has the most important feature of such applications disabled, so it can't save any of the data retrieved on your defective media. Anyway, you can use it to check if your data can be recovered and approximate the amount of data loss you'll have to face. After all, in most cases there is some data damaged beyond any hope of recovery...












The setup package of this program is very small, having less than 1MB in size, and you shouldn't have any problems while installing it, because there's nothing special for you to do during the installation of the program, just press some "Next" buttons, as usual.

Interface

The interface of this program looks a bit old, but it's very easy to use and well organized. All the tools are available in the Recovery menu or by using a button from the Recovery Source pane, located to the left side of the main window. The graphics are average, and the overall feeling I get from this program is, just as I said, that BadCopy Pro's interface comes from the past. The good part is that everyone should be able to use it without getting into any dead ends, and that's what most people are looking for - ease of use first, while the eye candy can wait...

Features

The basic feature of this program is - obviously - to recover data that seems to be lost. Now, let's see what can be done and what can't, shall we?

It all starts with the floppy disk, of course. All you have to do is pick it from the Recovery Source pane or click the Floppy Disk Data Recovery item in the Recovery menu. Once you do this, the wizard starts to ask your input in the pane to the left. No matter what kind of storage device you are using, there are 5 steps to perform, and because I don't have a floppy disk drive on my computer anymore, I used my Flash drive to go through the entire process.

Once I selected the Flash Drive option in the Recovery Source pane, the first step of the wizard required me to select a drive. Well, I only have one USB drive, and it would be nice for the program to choose it automatically. Also, you have to pick the recovery mode. There are two modes available - one allows you to rescue corrupted data, and the other recovers deleted files.











After you press Next, the scanner appears so you can set the scan options (for example, to look only for a certain file type) before proceeding. The funny part is that I selected a partition of my hard drive as Flash device...and now the program is scanning it! Well, back to the start...especially since the producer says this program doesn't recover data from hard drives.After performing a scan of the right device, which was pretty fast, I noticed that the wizard jumped to step 4/5 already, asking me to preview the recovered files (this option works with the trial version) and select destination folder for saving recovered ones (obviously, this is useless, since when you press Next, you're shown a message about using the trial version).

This is it, and the funny part is not over yet, because when I press Back in the 4th screen of the wizard, BadCopy Pro takes me back to... step 2. Pretty confusing, don't you think?

The Good

BadCopy Pro is fast and I got previews of data that I thought forever gone while using this limited trial, all after a pretty fast scan process of my USB drive. With a bit of luck, even my mother could use this program!

The Bad

Luck shouldn't have anything to do with using a program, but I found that BadCopy Pro's interface has some issues. If this program doesn't work with hard drives, why was I allowed to scan my fixed disk drive? Even more, the wizards jump from a step to another and tend to confuse the user. Since hard drive data recovery doesn't seem to be one of the features, I think that almost 40$ is too much!

Conclusion

I heard a lot of good things about BadCopy Pro so far, but this was my first close quarters encounter with it. Sadly, I am not impressed at all. In fact, I am disappointed. I know that data recovery is usually done by power users, or at least by people that have enough experience with various Windows programs to overlook the drawbacks of this one, but I want to get the best value for my money, and this is not true this time.

Developer: CSoftLab
Price: 39.95$
Trial Link: Download