In order to recover files or folders, you must scan the drive or partition and then search for damaged or deleted files or folders.
If you have found some damaged or deleted files and you are not sure whether or not a file is safe for recovery or you are not sure whether or not the file data has been overwritten on the drive, you may preview the contents of files with this feature.
For Preview mode to be available, File Preview component needs to be selected when you are installing the software. If File Preview has not been installed, Preview command will be greyed out and inaccessible.
If the file data has been overwritten on the drive, it is not likely that the file can be previewed. If this is the case, you will see a warning message, and file will be previewed in Hex format.
If you plan to purchase the commercial version of Active@ File Recovery, you may want to preview file contents to help you determine whether or not the contents are valuable using the DEMO version of the software. If you can preview file contents, it is likely that you can recover the file.
Preview file contents using the built-in preview module works with the following image files: *.bmp, *.wbmp, *.dib,*.gif, *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.pcx, *.ico, *.tif, *.tiff, *.png, *.wmf.
Other document types can be previewed using an external viewer like Microsoft Word or using the built-in Hex/Text viewer. If you want to preview a file named MyDoc.DOCyou must have an application installed that is able to open *.DOC files. The file will be rendered and previewed using this application.
If you do NOT have an application installed that is able to open *.DOC files,the file will be previewed in the default built-in Hex/Text viewer.
For example, if you have Microsoft Office installed, most likely you will be able to preview office document types: *.doc, *.docx, *.xls, *.xlsx, *.ppt, *.pptx, *.vsd, *.mpp, *.rpt.
Important
Avoid previewing large files! In order to preview a file's contents, the file needs to be recovered and placed in temporary storage. The built-in or external preview utility reads this temporary file.
If you have enough RAM, the temporary file is kept in volatile memory. If you do not have enough RAM, a temporary file could be written onto the drive that contains damaged or deleted files and there is a chance that you may overwrite your original deleted data.
Note
You cannot preview encrypted files and files having size more than 10MB.
This document is available in PDF format,
which requires Adobe® Acrobat® Reader
(Free download):
