Thanks for your questions....
The help file is comprehensive and acts as the manual. You can read this in the demo version. We update the program regularly so this is the be place to go for information.
When you purchase Recover My Files it is yours to keep and use as many times as you like for as long as you like - it is not time limited. To support development of the product we are moving to a 12 months subscription model where you will be able to download updates for a 12 month period, and then subscribe again at the end of the 12 months. This should be in before the end of the year.
A "physical" drive refers to the physical drive inside your computer. If you have 1 hard drive attached then you will see 1 physical drive listed in Recover My Files. As you know it is possible to have multipe partitions on a single physical drive, so 1 physical hard drive can have a C:, D:, E:, and F:. When you select to search a "physical drive" Recover My Files ignores all the partitions and just searches the drive as one big chunk of raw data. If you chose to search a drive letter, then the program will only look at the contents of that partiton.
Reinstalling windows puts the new installation of Windows at the start of the disk. Any of the original files that were stored at the start of the disk will have been overwritten by the new installation and destroyed. However most of this data is going to be the old installation of Windows and the majority of the client data should be able to be recovered.
In your situation the best results will be acheived by running a "Complete Format Recover". If the drive now has a drive letter, ie. C:, that is the entire size of the drive then you should search the drive letter. When you run a "Complete Format Recover" it is important that you only search for the default selected file types - DO NOT add more file types, particularly music or multimedia, as this will slow down the search. The program uses the default selected file types to find the old partition information. At the end of the search the entire old partition will be rebuilt, and you will be able to peruse the partition in the "Folder View" section of the results screen.
You should be able to get an indication from the search progess bar how long the search will take. I am not sure how big the drive is, but if it is say 160gb then a "Complete Format Recover" for the default selected files types will take about 10 hours to run.
Please make sure you are using the latest version, 3.80. You will need to send me the link in order for me to know if the sites are authorized distributors of Recover My Files (you can send it to
graham@***getdata.com (take out the ***). If the site offers a discount then we will match the same price.
I hope this helps.