Preview File Contents (Recovery Status Check)

If you have found some damaged or deleted files and you are not sure whether a file is safe for recovery, you may preview to contents of the files with this feature. Similarly, if you are not sure whether a file’s data has been overwritten on the drive, you may use preview feature.

For the Preview mode to be available, the File Preview component needs to be selected when you are installing the software. If File Preview has not been installed, Preview 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 the file will be previewed in a Hex (raw data) format.

If you plan to purchase the commercial version of Active@ File Recovery, you may want to use the DEMO version of the software to preview file contents to help determine whether the contents are intact. If file contents can be previewed, it is likely that you can recover the file.

Previewing file contents using the built-in preview module is compatible 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.

For example, if you want to preview a file named MyDoc.DOC, you 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.

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.

To preview file contents and check recovery status:

In Active@ File Recovery, search for deleted files and folders and select the file.
To run Preview, use one of the following methods:
- Click Preview on the toolbar
- Right-click the file, and choose Preview from the context menu.
A Preview window appears with the first page of your document.

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