Simpler products, such as free undelete utilities, deal with the file system. They scan the file system to locate records of files that are marked as deleted, and clear the mark. This fast and easy way to recover lost files only works sometimes, e.g. if you deleted a file just a minute ago. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of recovery with these tools are slim.

Other products deal with your hard drive directly. They are slow, expensive and extremely complex to use. They don't show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content.

DiskInternals Word Recovery provides the best data recovery, offering unprecedented efficiency and dealing specifically with Microsoft Word documents. It scans the file system and learns about the files that were deleted, just as the free undelete tools. Then, it scans the hard drive directly to locate Microsoft Word documents that are not shown in the file system. It uses a list of file signatures such as .DOC and .RTF to detect the beginning and end of Word documents. This method works even if your hard drive is half dead!

DiskInternals Word Recovery synchronizes the results obtained with the scan of the file system with the results obtained by accessing the hard disk directly, presenting the complete list of recoverable Word documents along with their file names and contents, and yields the best ratio of recoverability.

Find and recover a specific document with 'On the Fly' filters that allow displaying files with specific title, created by specific author, that contain certain text or have certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version allows full document preview to ensure that you recover exactly what you want, and that the complete document can be recovered with no errors.