Viewing Recovered Files
After a hard drive crash, I repair the drive. I then extract out the needed data files. Sometimes, these files have to be recovered through data carving. They will get assigned random names like 14583.doc or 184893.jpg. Well, you can imagine these names are not real useful for my clients.
I was recently introduced to a program called Directory Opus. This is a very of Windows Explorer to view files. The awsome thing about it for data recovery is that it shows file metadata. If you don’t know, Microsoft Word documents and other have things like their title and author embedded in the document. Well, with Directory Opus you can see all this data in the file tree. It will also show the EXIF data associated with photos. The user can drill down into zip archives to see what they contain.
It also has a nice dual pane interface to allow files to be moved about onto the new locations the client needs them. It has advanced ways to automate the process for the client that wants to put in some more time learning how to operate the program.
The software comes with a free 30 day trial. That should be plenty of time to get your recovered files straightened out.
Before someone writes in and tells me… I know you can view these same file properties in Windows Explorer…just not in the default view. The view the metadata in Windows Explorer.. just go to the top of the view pane where you see the column titles, right click, and a list of attributes the user can add to the view will show up. Just left click on title, author, or whatever else you would like to add, This way is completely free with no new install… whichever you like. Directory Opus is prettier though 
Happy file browsing!