7-Data Recovery Suite is an easy-to-use undelete tool. It's a commercial product, and far from cheap ($19.95 gets you a "7-day license" only; you need to spend $49.95 to get a lifetime license, $79.95 to use it in a business environment). Still, the free version does allow you to recover up to 1GB of data, and so may be useful if your preferred undelete programs have failed.

One immediate issue with the program is that it must be installed. 7-Data Recovery Suite warns you not to install it on the drive where your lost data was stored, but it would still be more convenient if the program was portable.

With that setup out of the way, 7-Data Recovery Suite opens with a Windows 8-type interface, its key functions organised into four simple tiles. These allow you to recover partitions, accidentally deleted files,  files from a working or formatted hard drive, files on external drives, or data from Android devices.

While this sounds good, these options don't always deliver what you might expect. We ran the "Lost Partition Recovery" tool on a drive without any lost partitions, just to see what it would do. Scanning would be completed in seconds, we thought, but no: the program spent 12 minutes checking the entire partition, before reporting 51 "lost" partitions, each with their own set of files. Checking within an existing partition for the remains of others isn't a bad idea (we might have overwritten an older partition with this new structure), but finding 51 partitions - when there would have been 3 or 4 at an absolute maximum - really isn't.

Fortunately regular file recovery is a little more straightforward. Our NTFS test drive was scanned quickly, results displayed in an Explorer-like tree. We could filter the results by file type, date and size. A Thumbnail view helps you find images, while additional text and hex previews can be useful for other file types. And once you've found what you need, your data can be recovered in just a few clicks.