Document Recovery - Recuva

Everyone's deleted something in error and cursed themselves - but most of see that data as being gone for good. Recuva (by the same people behind the excellent CCLeaner, and a rare-British small software house!) wins my award for being a life saving bit of freeware.

A simple, tiny download. Quick installation with no questions asked. Simply interface, quick scanning ability and a high recovery rate. It's simple and it works - I don't think there's much more I need or could say about a piece of freeware that you'll rarely use but the time you do use it you wish you could kiss it's creator!

My only complaint is I cant see a portable version currently - running it straight from a USB key would be excellent - but hey, if that's all I can fault it for, that's going pretty well!

Whilst I'm on the topic of deleting data- why hasn't Windows get any better at this yet? The Recycle Bin (as ever, stolen from the Mac world) was a great feature (once people remembered that stuff was put in there by default and disk space was no longer an issue- I remember in 1996 with Windows 95 everyone cursed the recylce bin for a time because people thought deleted items should just go straight away because it left people scratching their heads as to where all their disk-space was going) but seemingly after that we've had nothing.

No, I tell a lie, Vista gives us version control and recovery of document files. That's a good feature- shame it ain't obvious to normal users and isn't integrated into (at least Microsoft's) apps- e.g. you can roll back the document without dropping out of the program itself and digging it out through Explorer.

It seems like the future may be the world of Time Machine that Apple's introduced (again, leading the pack)- but we need it for Windows.

Some simplification/streamlining of the delete process would be great too- shift-delete and delete make sense to me - but I imagine it has caught a few people out- perhaps everything should go into the recycle bin first- but perhaps have stuff tagged for over-writing (e.g. it won't take up disk space but can be restored up and until the time that it's overwritten). How about making network deletition (and cut and paste actions) not result in data loss - how may times have you deleted something on a network share in error- then remember that it rather than going to your recycle bin or even the network resource's recycle bin, it's simply moved into the wonderful world of file oblivion?

And finally, since I've clearly got rage on the whole issue I might as well cover the final bit of the problem- where's the decent backup software? The simple stuff, that works on servers (because there simply isn't a good MS Exchange / DFS backup solution on the market) and is seamless to use for everyone. The stuff that is switched on by default (just like the security experts say the firewall should be, the usability experts should be saying the same thing), the stuff that means we can roll back software and changes without it breaking everything else...

Part of my rage on the issue is this- today I successfully installed recuva and pull back 20 gigs of data which, after being deleted from a network share, looked to be lost. It was easy. When I was asked the day before to recover something from a backup (woho- something which had been deleted was actually being backed up) made by a leading manufacturer's backup product (Symantec (cough) Backup Exec (cough)) it failed- and after doing a bit of reading it's a known issue- which means a serious change to the backup configuration to prevent it from happening again and a serious amount of effort (and, thus far, wasted time) trying to recover a single document (less than 5 meg!). Where's the balance, the innovation in the market? Apple, once more, seems to be leading the pack in making things which just work- why can't Microsoft/Windows developers be there when it counts?!