I’ve always found the Windows Recycling Bin prompt that asks “Are you sure you want to empty these X objects?” to be rather irritating. So much so, in fact, that I seem to have developed a reflex that leads me to immediately click “Yes” without thinking.

Which, frankly, leads to some seriously impressive cussing every time I realize I just erased a file or folder I shouldn’t have… like my entire music library. (No, I hadn’t realized that I’d sent it to the Recycle Bin. I thought I was just moving the thing.)

When you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on music downloads and find they’re all gone in the click of a mouse button, you’ve got two choices: suffer a cardiac arrest, or use a Handy Recovery, a sanity-saving program that restores deleted files or folders, even those dumped from the recycling bin.

The program can even restore files damaged by viruses and disk errors, along with files stored on deleted partitions. Since it uses a browser interface similar to Windows Explorer, there’s no risk of recovering things you don’t really want: you see the deleted files along with your regular ones, then select which you want to restore.

You can even filter them by file name, mask, date or size if you have a hard drive as bulging with excess files as mine is. Don’t have time to go through them all at that moment? No problem: you can create an optical disk image and save it for later review and file recovery.

No, the program’s not free (although there’s a 30-day trial download), but frankly the $39 cost is a fraction of what I would have spent re-purchasing my songs from Amazon and Wal-Mart. And, considering the peace of mind it gives me to know that my hair-trigger mouse clicks don’t really mean my files are gone forever, well, that’s priceless.

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