Safety and efficiency of the software

UFS Explorer is a "read-only" data recovery solution. The software doesn’t write anything to the processed storage medium nor does it try to fix any of its structures. As long as the device doesn’t have any physical issues, its employment is totally safe for the storage and the lost information it contains. However, one cannot completely exclude the possibility of misuse of the software or its certain functions which can potentially lead to overwriting of the data. Therefore, please strictly follow the instructions provided in the supplementary materials for the software to avoid any negative consequences.

UFS Explorer can be used without any concerns for the security of sensitive information that may be processed with its help. All operations are performed by the software on-site and no data is transferred to any remote servers or third parties.

The software works with all the existing formats of digital files and can theoretically be used to recover any data on supported storages that were not corrupted beyond recovery. Yet, an essential prerequisite for a successful procedure is that the lost information must be present on the storage. If the data was erased through being overwritten with other data – by the system, shredding/wiping utilities and other means – it gets permanently destroyed and can in no way be restored. Also, there are cases when the information appears to have never been written to storage, for example, when the so-called "delayed writing" took place. In this situation, a file may not be instantly saved to the disk and wait in the computer’s cache for the appropriate opportunity, which may not come eventually due to some unexpected issue or immediate deletion of the file.

The lost file remains on the storage until the space occupied by it is used to write new data. Therefore, the less writing activity takes place on the drive which contains deleted or lost information, the better result of data recovery can generally be expected. However, such factors as the size of a file and the amount of free space on the disk may affect the chances to recover the data. Parts of larger files may be scattered across the storage, increasing the likelihood of the file being partially overwritten, and when the storage is almost full, the system is more likely to reuse the released space to store new data.

Furthermore, the quality of the obtained result depends to a great extent on the file system applied on the storage. This is a mechanism that defines the way how information is stored, accessed and deleted from the storage device, and different types of file systems employ different methods to perform these operations, leaving more or fewer possibilities to recover the data.

UFS Explorer is a data recovery tool that can locate the lost data and enable its copying to another storage device. It is not designed to fix storage structures or modify its content in any other way. The use of "repair" tools is not recommended unless the necessary information has already been retrieved to another safe location.

UFS Explorer is distributed as shareware. All the functions of the software are presented in the Trial version, so you can try them out before making a purchase decision. Yet, the Trial version of each product puts certain limitations on the size of the files which can be saved. The software will show all the recovered data, but the files whose sizes exceed the limitations can be copied only after the license is activated. To get the Trial version or the accurate information about the Trial limitation, please, refer to the webpage of the corresponding product.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to estimate the time needed to complete the scan as it is determined by many external factors. These include the type of storage medium, the amount of data stored on it, the speed of connection and other circumstances.

In some cases, it is possible to accelerate scanning by connecting the storage device using the fastest available type of interface. For example, direct SATA connection is preferred over USB one for hard disk drives, USB 3.0. is much speedier than USB 2.0 for thumb drives and other digital media connected via an external USB adapter. Moreover, the process will be considerably faster if you use a disk image file instead of the actual storage device.

UFS Explorer is equipped with algorithms that allow it to restore the structure of the file system and the actual file names. Yet, in some cases, the original folder structure may undergo irreversible corruption becoming unrecoverable, and on top of that, some types of file systems tend to erase the original file names after certain operations (deletion, formatting, etc.). Under such circumstances, the folder or name for the file will be assigned by the software itself to keep the data recovery possible.