Lifehacker’s Kevin Purdy reviews DriveLook, a free utility that scans your hard drive and search for strings of text to save your lost data:

 

“The app initially starts as unlicensed, somewhat disabled software, but you can grab registration information from the DriveLook page. It's not super-intuitive where you enter your search terms, but it's in the box at the bottom, one per line. You can get more specific with the variables up top, but if you know the words from a Word file are hanging around somewhere on your drive, just type in a few words you remember from it, and hit ‘Start.’”