As long as there are human beings using computers, there'll be a need for file recovery or 'undelete' software.

Be it a lost document, some accidentally removed photos or allowing strangers with itchy delete fingers near a machine, files are sometimes deleted when you don't want them to be. Thus, a cottage industry of generally not too cheap software has sprung up to service us in our moments of desperation.

Recover My Files is one such tool. It's a small download, weighing in at around 8MB, and after installation you're presented with four options. Firstly, and the least effective, is the option to do a quick search for files. It's not too quick, and you can determine what type of files to hunt for. But given that the fast search is primarily for material that's very recently been lost, it's generally not the best choice.

If you want proof that file recovery is an exhaustive and time-consuming job, though, the program's complete file search is ample evidence. This does a cluster level search of a drive - and you can run the program on the likes of flash memory cards and external storage too - and inevitably takes an awful lot longer. It also tends to throw up more results, but it's not necessary if you've only lost a file just hours before.

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Recover My Files also features options for recovering files after a disk format, although you should allow yet more time for that. Fortunately it's the kind of job you can easily leave running overnight to see what the program comes back with.

We started with the fast file recover to get an idea of how the software worked and, after around a quarter of an hour, it had certainly uncovered a large number of files. The fuller search took nearly four times as long, although it did manage to find 21,752 files. Contrast with that was the aforementioned quick search, which dredged up 11,385 files on our test machine.

A nice feature of the software is that when you highlight a file - and for all of those it finds it indicates the likelihood of successfully recovering them - there is a preview panel at the bottom of the screen for supported file formats.

And while it's a little stringent in the defaults it sets, the left pane of the working screen allows you to filter results down by format, which proves to be a useful option given how many files the software reports back. There could perhaps be a bit more effort put into the file organisation, and it inevitably throws up Internet files en masse, but there's little question it does a thorough job.

Crucially, it also delivers on file restoration. While there are tools available for free that purport to be able to recover files, we found Recover My Files had a good success rate, particularly on recently lost files.

You do need to have the full version - rather than the freely downloadable demo - to bring a file back to life, and the $69.99 asking price is fairly steep. But it could prove indispensable nonetheless. Chances are, if it recovers the file you're looking for, you might consider it a bit of a bargain.

As it stands, this is a good, successful application, but one you're only likely to stump up for when you really need something of its ilk. Not cheap, but could well prove invaluable on its day.