Recover lost, trashed or formatted files easily
If you spend any time around computers, chances are you’ve seen or experienced some form of data loss at some point. These days there are companies that will do an amazing job of recovering your files, for an equally amazingly large amount of money. So before you go breaking open your piggy bank, try flexing some free data recovery muscles yourself first.
For the impatient
Check out the appropriately named Recuva, a sweet and simple no mess application that will search out files on the drive the OS is no longer showing.
Simply choose your drive, click Scan, select/check the files you are after, right click and Recover Highlighted/Checked.
Recovery from damaged or reformatted disks
If you have a disk that is damaged or has been reformatted, you will want to enable the option to ‘Scan for non-deleted files’ under Options > Actions > Scanning (top right of main Recuva window).
Note that using Recuva with this option will seek out and list every file that hasn’t been overwritten – which will most likely include a ridiculous amount of windows recycler-named files. The good news it it also recovers folder heirachy, so you can sort your files by path to make it easier to find files lost in specific folders.
Overwritten and corrupted files
If you have trashed something fairly large such as a movie and some time has passed, it may be likely that some of the data has been overwritten by new files as time has progressed. In this case, Recuva will let you know how much of the file is salvageable, but expect to have difficulties as you have lost some data.
This is the same if physical damage to your drive has damaged some sectors, if parts of your file lay across those sectors then that data may also be gone for good – however for larger files such as media it may be worth trying to salvage anyway.
Drive is not formatted problem
If you are seeing the fairly common error prompt;
This drive is not formatted, do you want to format now?
you may be able to repair the filesystem on your hard drive and have all your files accessible again, however you should probably try copying off important things with Recuva first if possible – you never know, the drive may decide to throw in the towel at any moment.
Unable to read boot sector
If Recuva is telling you this when you select a drive and click scan, then things have probably gone way past pear-shaped. Maybe repairing the filesystem on your hard drive will work, and at this point there is no reason to not try – things probably can’t get much worse.
Experiences
I used Recuva to great success, with the ‘Scan for non-deleted files’ option checked, on a 500GB USB 2.0 Western Digital external drive that was completely messed up, crashing Explorer if you so much as clicked on its icon under My Computer. I ran Recuva a few times, pulling off the most important smaller documents first and leaving larger music and movies till last, but it seems that my precautions may have been for naught as Recuva happily and speedily recovered everything off onto another drive.
This is definitely a superman addition to my tech support arsenal, and it will no doubt be to you as well.
Our experience
