Why Unlost costs nothing

How it is built

The engine is written from scratch rather than assembled around somebody else's library. The readers for NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ext2/3/4 and XFS, the journal parsers, the signature carver, the DEFLATE decoder used to check recovered Office documents, and the checksum implementation the test suite measures with are all part of this program's own source. That matters for one practical reason: when a drive comes back with something unusual on it, there is somebody who can read the code that read it and say what happened. What Unlost reads on a drive, and why is that code, described.

Why it exists

File recovery software is bought exactly once, in an emergency, by somebody who has no way to compare and no time to learn. That is a bad position to be asked to make a purchase from, and it shapes what the software is allowed to do to you.

So Unlost has one rule about money: there is no point in the program where it knows something about your drive that it will not tell you until you pay. The scan is free, the list is free, the preview is free, and saving the files is free. There is no file-count cap, no size cap, no trial period, no licence key and no account. If Unlost can see your photograph, you can have your photograph.

The second rule is that it says what it does not know. A recovery tool is trusted with the last copy of things people cannot replace, and the temptation in that position is to round every uncertain answer up. Most of the design described on the technical page is the same decision made over and over: where the drive does not say, do not invent. A missing letter in a file name is shown as a missing letter. A file whose length had to be guessed is named so you can see it was guessed. A file type that carries no checksum is reported as unverifiable rather than as fine.

What it costs to run, and where the money comes from

There is no money. That sounds like an evasion, so here is the arithmetic.

• There are no servers. Unlost does everything on your machine. It has no account system, no cloud storage, no server-side processing and nowhere to send anything — so there is no infrastructure bill that has to be paid by somebody. The only thing running anywhere is this website, which is static files.
• Nothing is sold to you and nothing is bundled. The installer contains the application and nothing else: no toolbar, no second program, no partner offer, no search-engine change, and no advertising anywhere inside the program. Money goes the other way — Unlost sometimes pays for an advert so that somebody who has just lost a folder finds out this exists.
• There is no data to sell. The website counts how many people open a page and how many press Download; the installer counts that an install finished, and the program counts that it was opened. Those are numbers, kept without cookies and with no person attached — nothing about your drives, your files or what you recover is collected anywhere, which is also why there is nothing here a data broker would buy. The privacy page lists every field, and carries a switch that turns the website's count off.
• The remaining cost is time, and a domain name. That is a hobby-sized bill, which is the whole reason a program like this can be given away without a catch attached to make the numbers work.

What free does not mean

Free does not mean guaranteed. Unlost is supplied as it is, with no warranty — the terms say that in the usual language, and it is worth reading once because file recovery is a field where things genuinely cannot be promised. A deleted file that has been overwritten is gone, and no program and no lab will bring it back.

Free also does not mean supported the way a paid product with a support desk is supported. Email gets a human reply, usually quickly, but from a person and not a rota. If your situation is urgent and valuable enough that you need somebody contractually on the hook for it, that is a legitimate need and this is not that product — the page on what to do when Unlost finds nothing covers when a professional recovery lab is the right call, including cases where running any software at all is the wrong move.

Do not take this page's word for any of it

Everything above is a claim made by the people who wrote the thing being claimed about. That is worth roughly nothing on its own, so here is the same set of claims restated as things you can verify yourself, before you run anything.

1. That it does not talk to anyone. Disconnect from the network entirely, then install and run a full scan. Everything works. Nothing about recovery needs the internet, so nothing about recovery breaks without it.
2. That the file you downloaded is the file we published. The SHA-256 of the installer is published on the security page, with the one-line PowerShell command that prints yours.
3. That it is not something else. Upload the installer to VirusTotal and have roughly seventy engines look at it at once. That is a more meaningful signal than any single warning box, and it is free.
4. That scanning and recovering do not write to the drive you are recovering. The destination picker refuses the source drive; it is not a setting you can override. The security page explains why the operating system, not our good intentions, is what enforces the read-only handle — and describes the one feature that does write, Erase, which destroys files on purpose and cannot run unless you ask for it by name.

And two things we would rather you heard from us than found out on your own. Windows will probably warn you before the installer runs: Unlost is new, and Microsoft Defender SmartScreen has no reputation record for it yet, which is a statement about how many people have run this exact file and not about what the file does. And when you get past that, Windows will name a publisher — Kanon Agro B.V., the company that publishes Unlost and holds the certificate the installer is signed with. An unfamiliar name on a prompt is worth stopping at, so it is written down here and in full on the security page, along with what the warning means and what it does not.

Getting in touch

Write to [email protected]. That address reaches a person, and it is the right address for all of the following.

• Unlost did not find your files. Read what to try when nothing was found first, because it will usually answer faster than an email will, and then write if it did not.
• Something looks wrong in the results. A file reported intact that opens broken, or the reverse, is the most useful bug report this project can get. Say which file system, which format, and what the app said before you recovered it.
• A security problem. There is a published policy and machine-readable contact details at /.well-known/security.txt, and the reporting section of the security page says what to expect: a human reply, no legal threats, and credit by name in the release notes for the fix if you want it.
• Something on this site is wrong. These pages describe how a real engine behaves, and engines change. If a page and the program disagree, the page is the one at fault and we would like to know.

Support is in English.