Recuva - an easy way to recover deleted files

The free Recuva program is one of the most popular means of recovering data from a USB flash drive, memory card, hard drive or other drive in NTFS, FAT32 and ExFAT file systems with a good reputation (from the same developers as the well-known CCleaner utility).

There are a great many diverse programs on the net. Every day, users install and uninstall various programs. In some cases, for a variety of reasons, a system failure occurs, and some data can easily disappear. The most important data on our computers are documents, photos, audio and video archives. To warn yourself against the loss of important data, it is highly recommended that you back up regularly. If data is lost and there is no backup, then Recuva comes to the rescue. This is a free program for easy recovery of deleted files.

When you delete a file physically from disk, it is not deleted. Only the record about it is deleted in a special table (the name of the file and its actual address on the disk are indicated in it). After this, the sectors containing the deleted file are overwritten with new information and after some time the data is permanently lost. To prevent overwriting data and its final loss, it is strongly recommended that you do not perform any file operations on the disk (data recording or copying). For this reason, I recommend installing Recuva on your computer right now and forget about it until you need it. The size of the program is negligible, because it does not take up much space. And the benefits that it can bring are sometimes invaluable. And it can be needed at any time, because no one is safe from accidental data loss. So, back up and keep Recuva handy. One day it will save your data.

Recuva Features and Key Features

• Recover files on your computer. Did you delete the file by mistake? Recuva will recover deleted files on your computer, flash drive, camera or iPod.
• Recovery from damaged or formatted drives. Even if you formatted the drive so that it looks empty, Recuva can still find the files on it.
• Recover deleted messages.
• Recover Deleted iPod Music.
• Recover unsaved Word documents. If you created a Microsoft Word document and did not save it due to a computer freeze, Recuva will help you recover Word documents from temporary files.
• Quick Start Recovery Wizard without additional settings.
• The presence of the Deep Scan function. Recuva can find most files in one minute. Deep Scan - Deep Scan.
• Safely delete files that you want to erase forever. Want to protect deleted files? Recuva also allows you to permanently clear all traces of deleted files.
• Availability of portable / portable version.
• Multilingualism: 37 + languages.

The process of recovering deleted files using Recuva

After starting the program, the recovery wizard will automatically open, and if you close it, the program interface or the so-called advanced mode will open.

Note: if Recuva started in an unknown language, close the recovery wizard by clicking the Cancel button, go to the Settings - Languages menu and select the desired language.

The differences are not very noticeable, but: when restoring in advanced mode, you will be able to preview the supported file types (for example, photo), and in the wizard - just a list of files that can be restored (but if you wish, you can switch to advanced mode from the wizard) .

The recovery procedure in the wizard consists of the following steps:

1. On the first screen, click Next, and then specify the type of files you want to find and recover.
2. Indicate the location where these files were located - it may be some folder from which they were deleted, a USB flash drive, hard drive, etc.
3. Turn on (or not turn on) in-depth analysis. I recommend turning it on - although in this case the search takes longer, but it may be possible to recover more lost files.
4. Wait for the search to finish (on a 16 GB USB 2.0 flash drive, it took about 5 minutes).
5. Select the files you want to recover, click the Restore button and specify a save location. Important: do not save the data to the same drive from which the recovery takes place.

Files in the list may have a green, yellow or red mark, depending on how well they are stored and with what probability it is possible to restore them. However, sometimes files marked in red are restored successfully, without errors or damage, i.e. they should not be missed if there is something important.

When recovering in advanced mode, the process is not much more complicated:

1. Select the drive on which you want to find and recover data.
2. I recommend going to Settings and turning on deep analysis (other parameters are optional). The Search for deleted files option allows you to try to recover unreadable files from a damaged drive.
3. Click the Analyze button and wait for the search to complete.
A list of found files is displayed with a preview option for the supported types (extensions).
4. Mark the files that you want to recover and specify the location to save (do not use the drive from which the recovery takes place).

I tested Recuva with a flash drive with photos and documents formatted from one file system to another (my standard scenario when writing reviews of data recovery programs) and with another USB drive from which all files were simply deleted (not in the trash).
If in the first case there was only one photo (which is strange - expecting either none or all), in the second - all the data that was on the flash drive before deletion and, despite the fact that some of them were marked in red, all they have been successfully restored.
Download Recuva for free (compatible with Windows 10, 8 and Windows 7) for file recovery from the official website of the program https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva/download.

Download Recuva:

Download Recuva

Recuva can also restore files to iPod and digital photos in RAW format. This application will help you recover your files from damaged and formatted disks, recover deleted e-mails, unsaved Word documents and other file types. The program is suitable for both experienced users and beginners - all file recovery operations take place in an understandable step-by-step mode. You can use the quick recovery mode or, in especially difficult cases, apply the deep disk scanning mode. In addition, using Recuva, you can not only restore files, but also permanently delete them from disk so that no data recovery program (including Recuva itself) can reach them.

Recover files on sd card after formatting

1. Launch the application.
2. Select the type of files you want to recover.
3. Indicate the possible location of the lost files.
4. Start the scanning process. If you wish, you can enable the Deep Scan mode.
5. Wait for the operation to complete.
6. Locate and restore the necessary files.

If there are a lot of detected files, you can try to find the necessary ones using the search function. But this is only if you remember the name of the files that need to be restored. To do this, you will need to go into advanced mode (the button on the right is a seruh).

The difference between full and fast disk formatting

With fast formatting, the OS writes the boot sector and the file system table (empty) to the partition. All memory card space is marked as unallocated and can be freely used by other applications.

With full formatting, zeros are written to disk sectors. Unfortunately, you will not be able to recover files from jammed sectors.

Features Recuva

Recuva works great with sd cards and flash drives. You can connect a memory card to a computer and work with it like a regular hard drive.
The Deep Scan option increases the chances of finding hard-to-reach files. Since it's about recovering from formatting, this is critical.
Recuva supports FAT / NTFS, Ext 3-4, and all operating systems.
Recuva is free - when you save the recovered files, you are not asked to purchase a license. There is no limit on the volume of saved files, there are no limitations in functionality.

System requirements for installing Recuva

The free Recuva utility is not demanding on system resources and can be installed on hard drives of computers and laptops that meet the following system requirements: any Windows operating system from 2000 onwards (XP, version 7, version 8 and 8.1, Vista on 32-bit and 64-bit platform), 15 MB of free disk space. By default, the program may offer you the installation of additional options to increase the usability, for example, Yahoo Toolbar. But, you can refuse it if you do not need it.

Key features

Recover Deleted Files
Data recovery work, both with removable media and with hard drives
Recovery of files of all main types (texts, music, video, archives, etc.)
Repair Damaged Files
System File Recovery
Conducting a simple or in-depth analysis of media for the presence of files (at the user's option)
Ability to preview some found files