Full Review

4 July 2007 - JoeSoft was founded with the simple aim of producing affordable products that the "Average Joe" could use, something that it has succeeded on both counts with when it comes to Klix. Or at least it has now that the company has had a rethink and reduced the price of this digital image recovery software by a whopping £15.

Just imagine, if you will, the wonderful feeling of excitement as you return home from your summer holiday, digital camera memory cards stuffed full of those irreplaceable holiday memories, ready to be download to your PC, printed for posterity and shared by email or web with your friends and family.

Now imagine the feeling of horror when you discover that somehow one of the memory cards has been corrupted, perhaps you pulled it from the camera while it was being written to, perhaps you accidentally reformatted it like a moron, perhaps you deleted the wrong folder to free up space, perhaps the IT Disaster Devil struck it down with a random bout of technical failure, as it does. The fact is, that whatever caused the problem, you are left with a memory card containing no memories.

Actually, that is unlikely to be the case. Your memories, those digital photos, are almost certainly still there, or at least most of them will be. You see when a file is deleted it isn’t, not physically at least, just the bit of code that tells your PC where to find it is. Same goes for most reformatting operations, the data is all still there on the drive but the information telling the PC where it all is and in what order is scrambled. Which means that an expert can recover that data, find those missing images and restore them in all their headless dancing on the beach glory. At a price, and what a price these boffins charge.

So what alternative do you have? Well you could lug a small photo printer around with you and print your photos every day so that should the worse happen you’ll always have a hard copy to hand. Or you could invest less than 20 quid in a simple to use software boffin of your own and know that whatever disaster may come your way, short of physically losing the camera or memory card, your snaps will be recoverable.

Here’s how it works:

1. Install software to PC.

2. Connect camera or insert memory card.

3. Select camera or card from a drop down list.

4. Scan for recoverable images.

5. Select images from the full colour thumbnail gallery that slowly appears.

6. Hit the recovery button.

7. Select a destination folder on your PC to store the recovered images.

8. Sit back with a cup of tea and smug grin as all your memories return to you.

And that, friends, really is all to it. Any Average Joe can do it, and in our tests where we reformatted a memory card with our images on, deliberately corrupted others, deleted folders etc, Klix did not miss a heartbeat or an image and recovered the lot.

What’s more, it did so at a price that beats off most of the competition in this particularly hot market with a big stick.

VERDICT
Simple software that does a complex job. An essential addition to your digital camera kit.

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