Recuva is one of the best free data recovery tools and my personal favorite choice and I always recommend it over similar file recovery programs. It is easy to use and as effective as any other free software or advanced file recovery program on the market. It was developed by Piriform, the makers of another great product, CCleaner.
I've been using Recuva almost exclusively in competition for a few years now and have nothing to complain about.
what do I likeThere are installable and portable versions.
Contains simple wizards and advanced options.
Supports multiple Windows operating systems.
The installer may try to add other programs to your computer.
It hardly gets updated anymore.
- Easy-to-use wizards ask the important questions and do the hard work behind the scenes
- It has a portable version and requires no installation
- Fast standard scan and optional deep scan cover all technical bases for searching for recoverable files
- Recuva supports scanning inside files so you can find documents containing specific text strings
- Provides a recoverability status for each file discovered by Recuva
- It can recover files from hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, BD/DVD/CD and MP3 players even if they are corrupted, corrupted or recently reformatted
- You can safely overwrite files found by the program to ensure that others cannot recover the files you see in the results. Coverage methods include DoD 5220.22-M, NSA, Gutmann and Secure Erase
- The folder structure can be restored along with the files if you enable the option in settings
- Recuva is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions
- It supports drives up to 3 TB
This review is for the free Recuva software, which does not include support or automatic updates like Recuva Professional.
First, visit the Recuva download page to get the software. For those who already have files to recover, the best option is the portable download (get it here, hosted on Softonic). This allows you to avoid installing anything after discovering that you need to recover files. If you downloaded the program for future use and don't have any files to restore, the standard installable download will be fine.
File recovery programs can recover files deleted from your computer only if the same space on the hard drive has not been used by other files. Every time you save or install something, the chances of the file being recoverable decreases. Using the portable version of Recuva prevents it from overwriting anything during installation.
If you download a portable application, you need to extract the program from the ZIP archive. After doing this, run recuva.exe or recuva64.exe, depending on whether you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows.
If a file is lost due to an error, virus infection, or system crash, this tool has a good chance of finding it. There's no guarantee that it will successfully recover any specific deleted files, but it's your best bet.
Here’s a quick introduction on how to use Recuva to recover deleted files:
When the program starts, you'll see a wizard where you can choose the file type you're looking for, such as messages or music. Alternatively, select All Files to have Recuva search all file types without limiting the results.
Next, you can define where it was last located, such as in a specific folder, drive, disc, or other device. You don't have to do this, but specifying where the files were deleted can speed up the entire recovery process.
Select Start to start the file recovery search. If you wish, turn on "Enable Deep Scan" , but if normal searching doesn't help, we recommend leaving this selected to get a second opinion.
After a quick scan, you will see a list of recoverable files. Recovering one of your deleted files is as easy as selecting it and clicking "Recover" .
You can switch to advanced mode at any time, which displays options and other sorting features, such as previewing a file or reading its header information.
