Tech blog [Geeks Are Sexy] points out an excellent, free file recovery program known as Recuva.
Recuva is does a great job of recovering deleted files, but what makes it phenomenal is the fact that it’s free. Big deal, you say? Try searching Google for data recovery services, and take a look at the prices people charge for software and services that recover your lost files. Those prices are astronomical because your data is important to you. When you’ve lost your data, anyone who has the skill and resources to recover it can effectively hold it for ransom.
We’re not calling all data recovery experts extortionists — there are people and companies who work on a professional level and do great work. We’re just wary of the outfits that are looking to turn the average Joe’s wallet inside-out over some digital photos of his family. Recuva is a welcome antihesis that practice. Recuva will fetch your deleted files from your hard drive, mp3 player, digital camera, or memory card and hand them back to you free of charge. In this article, Of Zen and Computing will cover the basics of recovering a file with Recuva.
Step 1: Download and Install Recuva
Visit the Recuva website, hit the download link, and grab the Recuva installation file. Once it downloads, run it. Installation will take just a few minutes, and follows the same run-of-the-mill software installation process than every other piece of Windows software does.
Step 2: Find Deleted Files
We had a top-secret text file called “my file.txt” that was accidentally deleted, so we’re going to enlist Recuva’s help in finding it. Start up Recuva by clicking on the application’s icon, and you’ll see a simple screen with an empty grid and a few options and buttons.
- From the dropdown box next to “Select drive”, choose the hard drive from which you’d like to recover deleted files. By default, this is set to the C: drive.
- If you know the file name or path that your deleted file was previously known as, you can type it into the box next to “Filter”. This is optional.
- Click the “Scan” button.
Recuva will scan for deleted files and show you its findings in the grid.
Recuva’s scanning process may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. How long the scan takes, and how many deleted files it returns, all depend on the computer you’re scanning. We ran this test on a freshly formatted Windows XP box with a small hard drive, so we only got a few results back.
OK, back to recovering our top-secret “my file.txt”. There’s no “my file.txt” in the list of deleted files that Recuva found, but there is a “Dc5.txt” that looks like it was recently emptied from the Recycle Bin. This could be our file. Why? Even though “my file.txt” wasn’t completed deleted, it’s existence was deleted from Windows’ file allocation table, and so Recuva might not find it under it’s old file name.
Step 3: Restore Your Deleted File
Since “Dc5.txt” looks suspiciously like our top-secret deleted “my-file.txt”, we’ll check off the box next to it and click the “Recover” button. This dialog window appears:
Select a location where you’d like Recuva to save your deleted file. In this case, we chose the desktop. Hit the OK button, and go inspect the recovered file.
Step 4: Examine the Recovered File(s)
Going back to the desktop, we find our previously-deleted text file waiting. It’s not called “my file.txt”, but we hope that’s what it is.
We double click on it, and…
It’s a match! Recuva found and recovered the text file that we had previously deleted.
Recover Files From Other Media
Using these steps, you can recover deleted files from virtually any type of removable media. Simply attach your memory card, digital camera, or even your iPod and select it’s drive letter from Recuva’s “Select Drive” menu.
Once again, a hat tip goes to [Geeks Are Sexy] for pointing out Recuva, and a big thanks goes to the folks at Piriform for making the excellent software available free of charge.
