A good recovery tool provides a safety net in case you mistakenly delete important data or need to rummage through your PC for buried files. Recover My Files is an application that lets you thoroughly search your PC and recover any files you’ve accidentally deleted.

Despite a fairly rudimentary interface, Recover My Files packs some solid search and recovery tools. The program guides you through the file recovery process, allowing you to select drives and folders to scan and file types to look for. You can do a general lookup for any type of file, or you can select to look specifically for graphics, documents, archives, emails or databases in order to speed up the process. We suggest using the filter tool to refine dates and certain keywords to narrow your search.

From the two search tools, Quick Search and Complete File Search we recommend using the latter because it is much more thorough. While Quick Search will take you around 20 minutes, Complete File Search can take from 1 to 8 hours but at least you have a better chance of recovering lost files. We were impressed by the number of files that came up with both search methods, however were surprised that Recover My Files did not let us filter results at the end of our searches.

If you’ve partitioned your drive and reinstalled Windows but realize that you need to recover some files, the program gives you a choice between Fast Format Recover and Complete Format Recover. The latter is much more thorough and, following the developer’s recommendation, we decided to search only for precise file types, to avoid an extremely lengthy process.

Recover My Files is a thorough and fairly speedy search and recover application. We recommend installing it for whenever you partition your disk or to prevent losing any important files. It is however, helpful to know what you’re looking for and where you're looking for it, since the huge number of results can be daunting.