Recover Files with Recuva

When I was working in IT in end-user support, I’d often get calls from people who had lost a file on their PC and needed to recover it. Over the years, I’ve used several different recovery tools, most of which were able to get the job done with varying degrees of success. But one tool I currently keep in my arsenal is Recuva.

Designed by Piriform, Recuva can help you find and bring back files that were deleted either because of a PC crash or other malfunction or simply because the user accidentally removed them.

As we all know, Windows by default doesn’t actually remove a file when you delete it. Initially, that file goes into the Recycle Bin to be stored in a dedicated area of your hard drive. That file stays put until you either clean out the Recycle Bin, or the file is kicked out to make room for more-recently deleted content. But even after the file is removed from the Recycle Bin, its bits still physically reside on the disk. Windows simply marks the file’s clusters as available, which means they can now be overwritten by new files.

All of this means that a deleted file, even one gone from the Recycle Bin, can often be revived if you get to it before new data overwrites it. A recovery utility looks for files that have been marked as deleted but which still exist on the disk. Beyond working their magic on your hard drive, many of today’s recovery utilities can bring back files deleted from USB drives, memory cards, media players, and other external hardware. Recuva is one such utility.

Available from from Piriform as a free standard download or as paid versions that include tech support, Recuva offers a couple of different options for recovering files. You can run the program in Wizard mode, which takes you through its process step by step by asking what types of files you’re looking to bring back and where they were located. You can choose from among documents, pictures, music, and more, and tell the program to scan your entire hard drive, external media, or a specific location.

After you’ve set the parameters, Recuva scans the selected location for the file types you specified. You can run a default scan, which is quick but may not always find your deleted files, or a deep scan, which takes longer to finish but does a more thorough job of looking for missing files.

Once the scan is finished, Recuva will display a list of deleted files depending on the parameters you chose. The program offers three types of views in which you can see your files. In List View, Recuva shows you a variety of different details, including the filename, location, last modified date, size, state, and comment. The state and comment fields can indicate the condition of the file and whether or not it’s actually recoverable. In Tree View, Recuva displays a directory tree of your drive. And in Thumbnails View, the software will preview certain types of files, such as images, so that you can tell visually if your missing file is on the list.

Select the file you wish to bring back, choose the location where you want to put it (Recuva wisely suggests putting the file in a different place than its original source in case there are further files in that location that you want to recover). Then click on the Recover button, and the program will do the rest.

Beside the Wizard Mode, you can also start Recuva in Advanced mode, which dispenses with the step-by-step screens and lets you search for files by name or path as well as type. A condensed details window then displays all the vital stats on your chosen files.

I’ve used Recuva to bring back a variety of different files, ones from my hard drive as well as from external media, and the software has always performed well. You’ll find a lot of different recovery tools on the market, both free and paid. But if you’re searching for a robust and user-friendly utility, either for yourself or your company, you don’t need to look much further than Recuva.