Learn how to effortlessly recover accidentally deleted files using Piriform's Recuva by checking out our guide

May 4, 2016 20:04 GMT  ·  By

Accidentally deleting files or forgetting where you've placed them can be a tragedy, especially when talking about important projects, family photos or personal music collections. However, data deletion is not permanent, and there are many tools out there that specialize in recovering items that were emptied from the Recycle Bin or deleted with Shift+Delete, even if the partitions were formatted afterward. One such tool is Piriform's Recuva.

We've selected the no-install edition of Recuva to make the process as clear-cut as possible. It has both a wizard for taking quick steps and an advanced mode if you're looking for more control. By the end of this article, you should see how simple it is to get it running.

What and where to search using the assistant

The wizard welcomes you at startup and offers to recover deleted files by going through several simple steps (Next->Next). First, it asks you to pick the type of files you're trying to recover from a list with All Files, Pictures (like digital camera photos), Music (MP3 files), Documents (like Word docs or Excel spreadsheets), Video (like digital camera recordings), Compressed (such as WinRAR or 7Zip archives) and Emails (from Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Microsoft Outlook). Only one kind of files can be selected (check the corresponding box).

After clicking Next, the assistant asks you about the whereabouts of these items, if you can remember these details. It can search any Removable Drives except CDs or floppy disks (such as media cards or iPods), My Documents, Recycle Bin, a specific location (click to browse a drive or folder) or a CD or DVD (click the menu to select a disc). If you're not sure, check the first box to search everywhere.

Right before starting the search, the application lets you know that it can perform a more thorough search if previous scans failed, but this will take a significant amount of time (tick the option to Enable Deep Scan). Otherwise, you can Cancel the wizard and immediately go to the main app window to configure detailed settings.

While Recuva is busy scanning the computer, you can view statistics with estimated remaining time and minimize the tool to the taskbar to continue what you were doing.

Simple mode and recovery

Once the scan is over, the program brings up to the screen a large window with a list of all found files, including their names, extensions, location, date of most recent modification, size, state and comment. Not all files can be recovered, so you can check their status by taking a look at the icon color next to each file name, status as well as comment. You have red for Unrecoverable, yellow for Poor state, green for Excellent state, "The file is overwritten" (it cannot be recovered), "No overwritten clusters detected" (it can be recovered).

You can sort the files by any criteria by clicking on the columns (Filename, Path, Last Modified, Size, State, Comment). To save files on your computer, check the boxes next to one or more items (depending on what you want recovered), click on the Recover button (bottom-right corner of the window), select a saving directory, and click Ok.

If you attempt to save the files to the same partition (this decreases the chance of successful recovery), Recuva shows a message dialog to ask for confirmation. After recovery, you can open the output folder to view extracted files and try to launch them to make sure the content is intact.

Advanced mode with Preview, Info and Header

If you're looking for additional control over the entire operation, you can Switch to advanced mode as soon as the results are displayed (before recovery). A new pane with three tabs will be shown on the right side of the main window, where you can Preview any image in an embedded frame, analyze file Info (filename, path, size, state, creation time, last modification and access time, comment, total clusters and offset), and examine a file's Header via hex display. To view information in these three tabs, you just have to click to select a file in the results list.

Search box

There's also a Search box available right above the three tabs, where you can look for a particular Filename or path in the list of results. You can also filter files by extensions by entering *.jpg, *.png and *.bmp, for example.

If you want to know the exact file types that Recuva is capable of finding, you can click the arrow of the Search box, select a category and then click inside the box to view a small list of supported file formats. For instance, if you select Documents, the tool shows *.doc and *.docx (Word documents, *.xls and *.xlsx (Excel spreadsheets), *.ppt and *.pptx (PowerPoint presentations), *.ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet), *.odt (OpenDocument Text), *.odc (OpenDocument Chart) and *.pdf.

Secure Overwrite and Options

To securely erase files and make sure they cannot be recovered by someone else, you can select one or more items from the results list, open the right-click menu and pick Secure Overwrite Highlighted (for highlighted files) or Secure Overwrite Checked (for files selected using their checkboxes). The default level of security is low, though. To increase it, you can go to Options -> Actions -> Recovering and click the Secure overwriting menu to select DOD 5220.220-M with 3 passes (fast, less secure), NSA with 7 passes (slow, more secure) or Gutmann with 35 passes (very slow, most secure).

In the Actions tab of the Options panel, you can configure additional search settings by asking Recuva to Show files found in hidden system directories, Show zero-byte files (contain no data), or Show securely overwritten files (erased with Recuva). You cand also perform a Deep Scan by default, Scan for non-deleted files to recover them from damaged or reformatted disks, and to Restore the folder structure (copies the original tree view when saving recovered files). Check the boxes next to the options you're interested in and click Ok for confirmation.

To get a better view of the data recovery tool, check out the video below as well as download Recuva.

Recuva Usage, Guide and Feature Demo

Recuva is a practical and useful tool for recovering deleted files, such as cherished photos or work documents. It may seem confusing to the untrained eye, but we dare to simplify everything in this video and article: http://www.softpedia.com/blog/recuva-explained-usage-video-and-download-503681.shtml

Recuva Screenshots (13 Images)

Welcome to the Recuva wizard
Select the type of files you want to recover in RecuvaSet the whereabouts of the files to reduce search time to look everywhere using Recuva
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