oops another design FLAW is it writes THREE log files to the install folder each launch which A: is bad and unnecessary for SSD drives and B: could be overwriting deleted data you need to recover but cannot because the program just overwrote it with pointless logging that is of no use to man nor beast! I deal with unwanted logging by creating a new folder in the same location as the log file I want to stop writes to by renaming the folder to the name of the log file after deleting the previous log file, invariably the program will try to open the folder name as a file for writing and fail and ignore the error and give up. It also autoswitches from quick scan to deep scanning which can take hours on modern drives without asking and without an option to stop the deep scan! Oh hang on, there IS an option to stop the deep scan it’s just obscured by a light grey square button that LOOKS LIKE IT’S a DISABLED BUTTON! DUHHH stupid GUI designer! Oh great the UI has crashed because I X’d out of one of the interstitial windows before it completed and it left the GUI with a disabled main “X” button so I cannot use the GUI to close the program to fix some OTHER file writes it’s doing CalcPartition.log and videoRepair.txt both surplus to requirements on a release build with no telemetry reporting… and an always blank file recoveryFree.ini A file update.ini is created when one does an update check… reporting inside it 8.2 is the current version being offered I did the same folder rename trick on that too and that makes the update check fail but we are not supposed to be entitled to free updates to a giveaway license anyway…
Unwanted file writes prevented are:
DYDLog.log
Eaolog.log
DefaultLog.txt
DYDUI.log
CalcPartition.log
recoveryFree.ini
Upgrade.ini
Oddly the file videoRepair.txt MUST be allowed to be written to or the program crashes when you try to scan a drive
This is a very poorly designed data recovery program writing megabytes of data to the installation drive by always saving scan results to the installation drive taking up tens of megabytes per scan done, you can delete the saved scans but you cannot prevent them from initially being created unless one does a similar trick and copies a 0 byte text file to the install folder and rename it to SaveScan after deleting the original SaveScan folder so the program silently fails but continues when it tries to open the now non-existent SaveScan folder as well as performing many unnecessary file writes described above as well as some others in the config sub folder.
In it’s default installation it is a fundamentally destructive program, overwriting previously deleted data on every execution and even more so after each scan and update check. If I were in the habit of losing files through bad data resilience practices or hardware failure I would choose a far less destructive file recovery solution.