Programs for recovering data from a flash drive. The best programs to recover deleted files
Hello friends! Today we have a small incident, because of which I urgently had to use free program to recover deleted files called R.saver, of course I tell you all the details, so the information may be useful to one of the readers.
I have long decided to make a review on our website with you all free programs for recovering deleted files and planned such an article, but here an ideal opportunity turned up to test another similar R.saver program in combat conditions.
R.saver is based on professional versions of very serious data recovery products UFS Explorer, site http://www.sysdevlabs.com/. The program can reconstruct damaged file systems, recover deleted files even after full formatting. Search and recovery of deleted files can be performed even if the desired partition of the hard disk is completely deleted and is unallocated space.
Free program to recover deleted files
A friend of mine collected for several years a "personal archive" consisting of favorite films, photographs, music and e-books. All these files were located on his additional partition (F:) of the laptop, also photos of friends, operating system archive, working documents and so on were located on this section.My friend knew that it was unreliable to store everything collected for years only on a laptop and specially bought a portable USB hard drive for his collection, connecting it to a laptop, he was going to copy the entire collection to a portable screw, went to the disk (F :), selected with the mouse all the necessary for copying folders and accidentally clicked instead of "Copy" "Cut"!
What to do next, my friend did not know, since he had never used this "Cut" function in his life, he called me and in a panic, said that all his files, collected by long and overwork, became translucent. I answered - you need to enter the USB portable hard drive, right-click on an empty space and select the "Paste" function from the menu. What happened next, my friend could not remember exactly, except for the fact that in the process of transferring files, for some reason he turned off the computer and decided to wait for me.
Arriving at his place in the evening, I turned on my laptop. Even if you turn off the computer during such a transfer, then some of the cut files should remain where they were, and the other part should be transferred to another specified location, but the result was completely different.
The laptop was missing almost all the files my buddy needed, which is about 100 GB! Most importantly, the folder called "Personal Archive" with all the archived files disappeared, only the "Home Video" folder remained. I was only able to find 5 GB of video files on a portable USB hard drive.
So, we are working, saving the collection with a free program for recovering deleted files R.saver. Let's go to R.saver official website and download it.
Note: Friends, if you want to temporarily retrain as a data recovery specialist from various media, you must follow the security rules. What are the rules?
The first rule is not to restore deleted files to the same hard drive where they were. In our case, you can connect a portable USB hard drive to your laptop and restore files there. Or you can connect a simple hard drive to a laptop using. Or, if the case is very serious, you can dismantle the laptop hard drive and connect it to a simple computer and recover deleted files with a special program, but this method, of course, is primarily for repair specialists. We launch our R.saver program.
The program is simple and in the course of work we will figure it out, in the main window you need to select from the list of sections the one on which the files were deleted. You can ask a question: - And if all of a sudden hard disk partitions are completely deleted, then what to choose and how to recover deleted information. We will also analyze such a case at the end of the article. I will delete all existing partitions from the hard disk and try to recover the deleted files located on them.
But first of all, we will choose to restore the partition (F:) of the laptop from which the files of my friend disappeared. "Disk management of our laptop", here is our section (F:),
On which there is only one folder "Home Video" remaining from the entire collection.
In the main window of the R.saver program, right-click on the F: drive and select "Search for lost data" Attentive users may notice that there is another option "Restore after formatting", later (in the appropriate situation) we will apply it.
We answer "Yes", as we want to perform a full scan of the partition (F:) for the presence of deleted files.
Performed file system reconstruction based on signatures using the IntelliRAW algorithm.
We are waiting for an hour and a little and we see that the program did not restore all the files, but oh well, more than half desired files restored, most importantly, the very necessary folder "Personal archive" was restored. I did not understand one moment in the program, why the size of all files is 0 KB.
So, we are restoring the found folders with files. I wonder if the files will be readable, it happens that the information recovery program will restore the files, but they turn out to be not working.
We right-click on the folder we need to restore and select (you can click "View" before restoring and see all the files in the folder being restored). Select "Copy to...",
Explorer opens, select the folder into which we want to copy the files claiming to be restored, then click "Select",
The file recovery process begins.
In the main window, right-click on the formatted partition and select "Restore after formatting"
The file system is reconstructed for an hour, then a search (lasting 20 minutes) for file systems on a formatted partition (50 GB in size) takes place.
In the window that appears with a list of found file systems, you need to select the file system of the type we need with a minimum positive offset, in our case it means the first one.
This hard drive belongs to another friend of mine who accidentally formatted his hard drive. So, the R.saver program found on it a bunch of century-old files and only two necessary folders.
Restoration occurs exactly the same as in the previous case, select "Copy to ...", the explorer opens, select the folder into which we want to copy the files claiming to be restored and click "Select", the file recovery process begins.
Restoring files from a hard drive that has completely deleted all partitions
And now friends, let's completely delete all partitions from the Samsung 120 GB hard drive (which we have already mocked in our articles) and see if it will be possible to recover deleted files in this case. We delete all partitions from our hard drive and run the R.saver program.
In the main window of the program, you can see that our entire 120 GB Samsung hard drive is an "Unknown Partition". Right click on it and select "Find lost partition"
Click on the "Find Now" button
Our 120GB hard drive took 40 minutes to scan. Just in case, save your search results. Among the partitions found, there are two partitions that are suitable in size to those that previously existed on this hard disk, this is a disk (C:) with a volume of 55, 24GB and a disk (G:) with a volume of 56, 43GB, tick them and click on the "Use selected" button.
The main program window opens,
We right-click on the found first partition 55, 24GB and select "View file system" (if you select "Search for lost data", the search will be repeated, but this did not work for me personally and there were no more files found).
In the window that appears, we see all the files located in the root of the disk (C:), let's try to go to the C:\Users\users\Desktop desktop and restore the files located there.
Please, all deleted files on the desktop are available for recovery. Right click on the desired folder and select "Copy to..."
In the explorer that appears, select a location on the hard drive and click "Select"
Files are being restored.
But with the disk (G:) everything did not turn out so smoothly, the program did not find the deleted files I needed.
But as I said, in general, for a free program, it worked well.
Friends, in the process of working with the R.saver program, I could miss something, I will be grateful for any help in the comments.
Programs for recovering deleted or lost files are quite popular. With their help, you can recover lost important files or folders.
For recovery, you do not have to turn to the services of professionals in this field. With the help of these programs, you can independently carry out recovery operations.
Our selection of programs in Russian will allow you to recover this data without any problems.
D-Soft Flash Doctor is a powerful software product designed to restore the operation of flash memory cards and monitor the status of drives. In addition, the software is able to back up user data. The D-Soft Flash Doctor (Rus) utility can be downloaded for free from this site. It is suitable for all flash drives. Free download D-Soft Flash Doctor 1.4.1 Rus Password to all archives: 1progs Key features of the utility: backup and disk imaging; work with different media (like…
Often, novice users delete or accidentally lose the necessary data from a laptop without knowing whether it is possible to recover deleted files, including on the desktop, and how to do it. Here, quite simple situations can take place, when lost documents are literally a couple of clicks away, there may be more serious problems, for which you have to use special applications.
Restoring from the trash
All files after deletion, while maintaining the standard settings of the computer, fall into the so-called. recycle bin - a special folder on the desktop, opening which you can easily restore any deleted information by selecting the desired object and selecting the appropriate item in the menu. But files can be deleted permanently without being placed in the recycle bin.
Inexperienced users often accidentally delete application shortcuts and documents from the desktop, believing that if they are gone, then the rest of the program has also been completely deleted. Many do not know in this case how to recover deleted files. It is very easy to do this, even if the basket is empty. There are two options:
- Roll back the system to the nearest restore point;
- Find the program in the main menu of the Start button and drag the desired shortcuts to the desktop.
The second option is preferable, but if the lost programs and documents have disappeared from the list of the main menu on the computer and you do not remember the directory in which they were installed, you will have to use the first one.
If you are deciding how to recover a deleted folder from your desktop, and the erroneous action was taken recently, then you probably won’t even have to go to the trash. Deletion can be canceled by simultaneously pressing hot Ctrl and Z.
Using a restore point
It is important to understand that rolling back to a previous restore point will not return the program, documents, and files if they were deleted. In this way, only the erased shortcuts on the desktop can be returned to their place. Here's how it's done in Windows 8:
A window will open, in which, by default, it will be proposed to restore to the most recent checkpoint. If necessary, you can set any other existing restore point.
We use third party applications
If the data and documents hard drive Since the laptop has been completely deleted and cannot be returned using standard OS tools, you will have to use special utilities to recover deleted files. It is important to remember the main rule that increases the chances of a successful return of data - do not make any writes to the disk partition that you have to work with.
Recuva is a simple free utility
most famous and simple application, with which you can recover deleted files, is . During installation, select the disk partition that does not contain data to be recovered. The principle of operation of Recuva and other similar utilities is approximately the same:
After the scan is complete, the recovery wizard will display a list of all lost documents that he was able to discover. Those that are marked with a green circle, the utility will be able to restore without any loss. If the color of the icon is red, then this file most likely cannot be returned - a record has already been made over it and most of the data and information about the file have disappeared completely.
All that remains is to select the files (to search for specific photos and documents, you can use the corresponding function), select the directory to save and click "Restore".
PhotoRec is another functional free utility
The name of the program should not be misleading. The utility recovers not only photos, but also most other types of files. Its advantage in the absence of the need for installation is downloaded from the office. site in the form of an archive, unpacked, after which you can work with it. This is an important property for such applications - the program can be immediately downloaded to a USB flash drive and already work with it.
The scheme for returning long-lost information is as follows:
- After launching PhotoRec, the main window immediately opens, in which a drive is selected in the top drop-down menu - you will have to work with it during data recovery. The program also works with their img format images created in other applications.
- Below in the window there is a list in which you can select a full disk scan or its individual partitions.
- Below you can set the file type to be scanned by clicking File Format. If you skip this action, the program will try to recover any accidentally deleted data that it can find.
- You can set the folder for saving the recovered information by pressing the Browse button. In addition, in the File System type menu, you will need to select a file system. If you are working in a Windows environment, check the second item. The Ext 2-4 system is the standard for Linux.
Let's compare the considered applications
For novice users, PhotoRec is no less suitable than Recuva described above. It is more powerful - it often extracts data from a computer better, but there is still one unpleasant feature. Free PhotoRec does not allow you to view the found files after scanning and select something specific from them. This should be taken into account when working with large hard drives - if you do not specify in advance which files are to be restored, everything will be saved.
Above, we considered the simplest free applications for retrieving accidentally deleted information on the desktop or lost documents after formatting flash drives, hard drives and other media.
It is important that PhotoRec, unlike Recuva, is also a cross-platform utility, i.e. capable of working in any operating environment.
Did you accidentally format your flash drive? Has your camera's memory card stopped being read? Deleted important files on your hard drive and emptied the trash? What to do? How to recover important photos and documents? For these purposes, special programs have been developed that allow you to recover deleted files even after formatting the media or emptying the trash. Attention
If you mistakenly delete important files from your hard drive or FLASH drive, do not write new files to this media under any circumstances. If new files are written to the sectors in which there were deleted files, then the old data will be irretrievably overwritten by the new ones! If you have 2 hard drives C and D on your computer. On drive D, you accidentally deleted a folder with photos or important documents. In this case, the download and installation of programs must be carried out on the C drive.
File recovery softwareProgram for recovering deleted files and folders from hard drives and USB flash drives. Supports all major file systems. Operates at a low level, reading data directly from the structure of the storage medium. Often helps where other similar utilities are powerless.
A free set of tools for recovering deleted or corrupted data on any type of media in Windows. You lost your photos, formatted your flash drive, or HDD, not readable CD / DVD? This program will help you.
A small free utility for recovering deleted data from hard drives and USB flash drives. Allows you to restore files from formatted partitions in a step-by-step mode, as well as delete data without the possibility of recovery.
One of the best programs for recovering deleted and lost data from Flash drives, memory cards and hard drives. Occurred as a result of software errors and damage to the storage medium. Working at a low level, the program allows you to recover data after a complete formatting of the storage medium. Minus - the interface is in German.
Active File Recovery recovers data lost when deleting or formatting media. The program includes a partition recovery utility.
A small specialized utility for searching and restoring accidentally deleted photos and videos from the memory cards of your phone, camera and any other device. Supports work with USB flash drives (flash drives)
Free handy tool for recovering hidden data on flash drives, as well as removing flash viruses. The program will easily restore the performance of the flash drive after the virus.
Accidentally deleted photos on your hard drive, flash drive or camera memory card? Have you formatted your device or has your hard drive stopped opening as a result of a system failure? This program will find, restore and save your favorite photos.
Recover deleted information from working, damaged, formatted or inaccessible NTFS partitions! The program recovers data from any device and supports any version of the NTFS file system.
FFRestorer is a program for recovering deleted files from a USB flash drive / memory card, or any other removable disk with the FAT16 or FAT32 file system. The program is free, easy to use and does not require installation.
It is difficult to find a user who has never had to bite his elbows, for example, after accidentally deleting an important document from a disk or an interesting picture from a memory card - this can happen in a fuss, and simply due to banal absent-mindedness. Of course, a file deleted from a hard drive in the usual way is not a problem to bring back to life using Windows tools - you just need to restore it from the trash. However, the recycle bin is more or less regularly emptied by special cleaning utilities, and data is often deleted bypassing the recycle bin using the Shift + Del key combination (in order to save time and space) - in this case, it will not be possible to restore an accidentally deleted file from the recycle bin using Windows tools. As for deleting files from USB drives and memory cards, they do not go to the trash at all - which means that they cannot be restored using the built-in Windows tools. Finally, accidentally deleting files is not the only way to lose valuable information. You can lose important data in other ways: as a result of a system failure, incorrect operations of a particular program, exposure to viruses, formatting a disk, deleting a partition, etc. In all these cases, the Windows toolkit will not be able to "revive" the files.
So, should you immediately rush to a data recovery specialist when you lose files? It is not necessary at all if you have a reliable utility for recovering accidentally deleted and lost files. As a rule, with its help you can recover at least part of the information without any problems. The main thing is not to waste time and follow certain rules of the game.
In a nutshell about file loss and recovery
You should not immediately put an end to accidentally deleted files, although they, for example, are not displayed in the corresponding folder of the explorer and are not in the trash. In fact, the deleted files are still on the media, because when they are deleted by means of the operating system, the files are not physically destroyed. It is not the body of the file that is deleted, but only its header; while the clusters in which it was written are simply marked empty and can be read until they are overwritten with new data. That's why deleted documents, presentations, snapshots, and more can be restored using specialized utilities.
Recovery of lost files is possible in a number of other situations. For example, after a quick format of a hard disk - after all, with such a procedure, information about the initial record of the placed files is reset (for example, in NTFS - in the MFT area), and all other areas of the disk remain unchanged. Some utilities can also recover data from disks that have a corrupted file allocation table, deleted data partition, etc.
However, it would be reckless to say that any file (even just deleted from the recycle bin) can always be restored. Alas, this is not the case, and failure is to a large extent associated with incorrect user actions. The fact is that any computer activity on the disk from which data was accidentally deleted can lead to the fact that clusters containing fragments of the corresponding files will be overwritten, because operating system perceives them now as empty. After that, the recovery of the corresponding files will already be more than problematic. Of course, with partial overwriting, a number of utilities restore such files, but it’s not at all a fact that such files can then be used (the exception is text documents, with separate saved fragments of which it will be possible to work in the future). As for the pictures, music, videos and other things restored after partial overwriting, this, as a rule, is futile. That is why, first of all, it is necessary to prevent the possibility of overwriting clusters - that is, do not write anything to a hard disk partition, flash drive or memory card with lost data, otherwise the chances of returning the lost information to life will be minimal.
In addition, the possibility of recovering lost data may be associated with a number of circumstances that are no longer dependent on the user at the time of recovery. So, the chances of success are higher when recovering files from media formatted in the NTFS file system, and not in FAT. The success of recovering a specific file also largely depends on the degree of its fragmentation: if the file is highly fragmented, then it is possible to hope (and even then with reservations) for its recovery only in the NTFS system, but on media with FAT, most likely, it makes no sense. Naturally, for this reason, it is especially difficult to recover very large frequently overwritten files on a heavily filled disk, which, due to circumstances, as a rule, always turn out to be highly fragmented.
It is also worth adding that none of the programs will be able to recover data after the guaranteed destruction of information by means of specialized solutions, as well as low-level formatting.
How to recover files
The most important thing is to start recovering accidentally deleted and lost files as soon as possible (ideally, immediately after deleting a file), although in practice it is not uncommon to recover even long-lost data. However, there is no guarantee that the document you need will be among such invisible “long-livers”, so you should not hesitate.
First you need to stop any computer activity on the medium of interest, since the operating system can write some other data in place of deleted or lost files (even if you yourself did not record anything at all), run the utility installed on the computer to recover lost files and scan it carrier. The situation becomes more complicated when it comes to recovering data on the system disk, on which the system writes something all the time. In this case, it is optimal to remove the hard drive with deleted files and connect it to another computer as a secondary one, and only after that proceed with the recovery process.
As a rule, in the corresponding tools, by default, a quick scan is carried out by analyzing file records. If the searched file cannot be found during such an analysis (this is possible if the disk was formatted, the partition was deleted, etc.), then it makes sense to resort to advanced analysis. With this analysis, a deep scan of the disk is performed with a full scan of all sectors - it takes more time, but it can be more efficient. In order to speed up the process, you can resort to limiting the search area by data type (images, documents, etc.), file name, etc.
In no case should you restore data to a scanned disk, although in a number of solutions it is possible (again, due to the danger of overwriting the sectors of interest). Therefore, usually the recovered data is saved to another hard drive, another hard drive partition or flash drive.
Before starting any data recovery, you should take into account the possibility that the cause of the loss of files may also be a physical malfunction of the device. Most of the solutions discussed in this article will not be able to help in this case, and the process of recovering information in such situations requires certain professional knowledge and experience. Besides, further work with a failed device can make it completely impossible to recover important folders and files from it. Therefore, in case of loss of critical information, it is wiser to abandon independent experiments and immediately turn to specialists.
Utilities to recover lost files
Until recently, utilities for recovering lost files were among the few categories where the bulk are very expensive commercial products, the capabilities of which are completely incomparable to what affordable, let alone free, utilities can offer. Now the picture has changed markedly, and today home users, if they wish, may well find effective programs on the market with which you can not only easily restore accidentally deleted folders and files, but also bring back to life data lost as a result of quick formatting a disk, deleting a partition, and etc. It is about such - affordable or even free solutions to restore folders and files - and will be discussed in this article.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery 6.6
Developer: MiniTool Solution Ltd
Distribution size: 5.64 MB
Work under control: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7
Distribution method: shareware (http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/download.html)
Price: Commercial license - $119; Personal license - $59; Free Edition - free (allows you to recover no more than 1 GB of data; only for personal or home use)
MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a comprehensive solution for recovering data from hard drives (IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB), memory cards, flash drives, CD/DVD and Blue-ray drives, iPod and other storage media. The program supports FAT12/16/32, VFAT and NTFS file systems and can recover files deleted from the Windows Recycle Bin, find and recover lost data (due to a virus attack, power failure, accidental formatting, partition deletion, etc.). In addition, this tool can recover data from damaged hard drives, as well as damaged, scratched or defective CD/DVDs.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery includes five built-in data recovery modules: Undelete Recovery, Damaged Partition Recovery, Lost Partition Recovery, Digital Media Recovery, and CD & DVD Recovery (Figure 1). Each one focuses on different data loss scenarios. The Undelete Recovery module is designed to recover files and folders deleted from the recycle bin or using the Shift+Del combination. Works with hard drives, flash drives and memory cards. The Damaged Partition Recovery tool allows you to recover lost data from existing but damaged or formatted partitions. MBR partitions and dynamic disks are supported: Simple Volume, Spanned Volume, Stripped Volume and RAID-5 Volume. The Lost Partition Recovery module is used to recover data from a deleted or lost (for example, as a result of disk partitioning) partition. The Digital Media Recovery module recovers data from digital media devices (flash drives, flash cards, memory cards, iPod, etc.) and is focused on recovering lost or deleted photos (including RAW format), music (mp3 files, MP4 files) and video files. The CD & DVD Recovery module is used to recover lost and deleted files from damaged, scratched or defective CD/DVDs. This module works with various types CD/DVD (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-R and DVD-RW), supports multi-session discs, some UDF discs (burned with DirectCD, InCD, packetCD) and can recover data from RW discs formatted using quick format.
Rice. 1. MiniTool Power Data Recovery window
with five built-in modules
Despite the lack of Russian-language localization, it is not difficult to deal with the nuances of recovering deleted and lost files in this utility, since all operations are performed under the control step by step wizard. For example, in the simplest case - when recovering accidentally deleted files - you just need to activate the Undelete Recovery module, specify the device to be scanned (Fig. 2) and click the button Recovery, after which the program will immediately display a list of found folders and files. In most modules, scanning can be fast or full, the latter taking more time, but also more efficient. The folders and files found during the analysis are marked with icons in the form of a cross, a question mark, or an exclamation mark - the cross is used to indicate accidentally deleted files, and other icons indicate lost data and RAW files, respectively (Fig. 3). Images and text files can be viewed directly from the utility before recovery.
Rice. 2. Run disk analysis for deleted files
Rice. 3. Presentation of scan results
in MiniTool Power Data Recovery
Auslogics File Recovery 3.3
Developer: Auslogics Software Pty Ltd
Distribution size: 3.69 MB
Work under control: Windows XP(SP2 and up)/2003/Vista/7/2008
Distribution method: shareware (15-day demo version that allows you to recover no more than ten files no larger than 100 KB - http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/file-recovery/download/)
Price:$49.95 (in the Allsoft.ru store - 990 rubles)
Auslogics File Recovery (formerly Auslogics Emergency Recovery) is a program for recovering accidentally deleted files, as well as files lost due to viruses or system failures. With this utility, you can recover documents, music, photos and any other files from hard drives, floppy drives, USB drives and flash memory cards. At the same time, you can recover not only files accidentally deleted in the usual way, but also files lost during the deletion of a disk partition or quick format. As additional functionality, the utility includes tools for guaranteed data deletion and creating disk images.
Recovery in Auslogics File Recovery is carried out under the guidance of a wizard (Fig. 4) and does not require any effort from the user (it is enough to decide on the media, file types, analysis option and, if necessary, set restrictions on the search area). The program has two scanning options: normal and deep (it is very long) - with deep scanning, it is possible to recover files lost after a quick disk format. To speed up the scanning process, you can resort to limiting files by type, setting up an exclusion list that includes files and folders that will be ignored during scanning, etc. Files found during the search are displayed in the main program window with an indication of the program's "opinion" regarding their status ( Fig. 5). The structure and names of folders, as well as file names are displayed unchanged even during a deep scan for lost data. You can preview files - pictures, photos, videos, text and PDF documents.
Rice. 4. Setting the search for lost files
in Auslogics File Recovery
Rice. 5. The result of scanning the disk with the program
Auslogics File Recovery
Handy Recovery 5.5
Developer: SoftLogica
Distribution size: 2 MB
Work under control: Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me/XP/2003/Vista/7
Distribution method: shareware (30-day demo that allows you to recover one file per day - http://www.handyrecovery.com/download.shtml)
Price:$ 49, in the Softkey store - 950 rubles. (we are talking about the latest Russian-language version of Handy Recovery 4.0)
Handy Recovery is a handy utility for recovering lost files. The program supports FAT12/16/32/64(ExFAT) and NTFS/NTFS 5 file systems and can recover data from a hard drive or other storage media, including CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and SecureDigital memory cards. The range of recoverable files covers a wide variety of formats: MS Office documents, archive files, mail databases (Outlook and Eudora), photos, music and video files, etc. At the same time, you can recover not only accidentally deleted files (deleted from the recycle bin, deleted bypassing the recycle bin) , but also files corrupted by virus attacks and crashes, and files from deleted or formatted volumes. In addition to this, the utility provides the ability to create accurate disk images for delayed recovery.
In Handy Recovery, developers have implemented two scanning modes: standard (performed by analyzing file records and helps recover deleted files if these records were not damaged) and advanced, which even allows you to find data when information in file records has been partially overwritten or damaged. Scanning in standard mode starts automatically immediately after starting the utility (Fig. 6), at the end of the process, a list of detected folders and files will be displayed in the program window; lost files and folders are marked with a red cross for convenience (Fig. 7). For each file, the probability of its successful recovery is indicated. The contents of a number of files (Word and Excel documents, graphic and text files, archives) can be previewed before being restored in the preview window. As for advanced scanning, it is used in cases where, after analyzing the disk, the files of interest were not found. With such a scan, you can search for strictly defined types of files (for example, images), lost file records, and also conduct a more thorough analysis of data deleted from the recycle bin (during a standard search, some of such data may not be found). The structure of the found folders and file names based on the scan results are displayed unchanged.
Rice. 6. Run disk analysis in Handy Recovery
Rice. 7. Display of data found during the analysis
in Handy Recovery
Recuva 1.43
Developer: Piriform Ltd
Distribution size: 2.44 MB
Work under control: Windows 98/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7
Distribution method: commercialware (http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download)
Price: Business - $34.95; Home - $24.95; Free - free
Recuva is a very easy-to-use file recovery utility from the developers of popular solutions like CCleaner and Defraggler. This tool allows you to recover photos, documents, music files, videos, etc. in FAT (including ExFAT) and NTFS file systems from hard drives, as well as from any rewritable media (flash drives, external hard drives, memory cards, etc.). With this utility, you can recover accidentally deleted files, recover files that were deleted as a result of system errors, crashes or virus attacks, and also try to recover files from formatted or damaged drives. Additionally, the program can be used for guaranteed data deletion. In addition to the standard edition, the utility has a portable edition that can be installed on a flash drive or external hard disk.
By default, the file recovery process is carried out under the guidance of a wizard (if desired, the automatic launch of the wizard can be easily disabled) - fig. eight; using the wizard allows you to narrow the search area, limiting yourself to searching for images, music, documents, etc. Scanning can be fast or deep. Deep scanning reveals large quantity files “buried” on the analyzed disk, but it also takes much more time. If necessary, advanced users can switch to advanced mode and perform more fine tuning search parameters - use the filter by file type to narrow the search area, enable folder structure recovery, etc. After the scan is completed, the list of deleted files is displayed in the main program window (Fig. 9); each found file is marked in green, yellow or red (the color indicates the chances of recovery). In advanced mode, the program additionally shows details about the file, image thumbnail, recovery quality rating.
Rice. 8. Run disk analysis in Recuva
Rice. 9. Result of file search through Recuva
Pandora Recovery 2.1.1
Developer: Pandora Corp.
Distribution size: 3.11 MB
Work under control: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista
Distribution method: freeware (http://www.pandorarecovery.com/download/)
Price: is free
Pandora Recovery is a simple utility for recovering files in a variety of formats: photos, music, videos, documents, etc. The program supports FAT16/32, NTFS, NTFS5 and NTFS/EFS file systems and allows you to recover data from local, network drives and flash drives. It is possible to recover accidentally deleted files, as well as lost ones (if the MFT record was rewritten by the OS, the disk is formatted, the file allocation table is damaged or missing). In addition to the free standard edition of the utility, there is a commercial portable edition of Pandora Mobile Recovery distributed on 1 GB flash drives ($19.95 per disc). It does not require installation and can be run directly from a USB stick.
File recovery, as a rule, is carried out under the guidance of a step-by-step wizard, and this process does not cause any difficulties, especially since the wizard starts automatically when the program is loaded. To start the search, you need to specify the disk and select the file search method (Fig. 10) - there are three options: search for all deleted files, search for deleted files taking into account the file name, size and creation / modification date, or full disk scan (Deep-scan ). The latter option is used to search for data on disks with a corrupted file allocation table, recently formatted disks, etc. Unfortunately, such a search does not recover file names and paths, only some types of files are found (images of the most common formats, MS Office documents, MP3 files, PDF documents and ZIP archives), and the scanning itself takes much longer . Also, this method only works on non-fragmented files. Found deleted and lost files are marked with red crosses, while the names of files with partially or completely overwritten clusters are displayed in red, the names of encrypted (EFS) files are green, and compressed ones are blue (Fig. 11). In addition, the program gives an assessment of the success of recovering the detected data as a percentage of overwriting: the higher the percentage, the less chance of successful recovery. Before recovery, you can view images of popular formats and text files.
Rice. 10. Run Disk Analysis in Pandora Recovery
Rice. 11. Result of file search through Pandora Recovery
Utilities testing
It was very interesting to try to evaluate in practice various programs for recovering lost data in terms of scanning speed and the effectiveness of detecting deleted and lost files, which we tried to do. To do this, all the utilities under consideration were installed on one of the hard disk partitions, and a 3.7 GB flash drive was allocated for the experiment. This flash drive appeared among the workers, and therefore contained certain information - in particular, a lot of distributions software, drivers, etc. One of the driver folders contained a Chipset folder, which included six subfolders with numerous subfolders and 914 files totaling 176 MB. It was this folder that was chosen as one of the test ones (of course, the contents of the folder for further analysis and comparison were copied to the hard disk in advance).
After that, the flash drive was formatted in the FAT32 file system with the built-in Windows tools so that nothing was left on it. Then, the Delete_files folder, previously prepared on the hard disk, was copied to the flash drive, including 50 files with a total volume of 66.8 MB. The files were the most different formats, including Word documents, Excel tables, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, ZIP, RAR and 7z archives, images (JPEG, TIFF, RAW, etc.), applications, music (MP3, WAV, MID), ISO images, SWF files, AVI movies, etc. d. Then all files from the Delete_files folder were deleted bypassing the trash (Shift + Del). After that, we conducted the first experiment on data recovery with each of the software solutions. The results are presented in the table.
At the next stage, in order to complicate the task, five new files with a total volume of 78.4 MB were written to the root directory of the flash drive. It is obvious that the last operation should have fundamentally worsened the recovery results (compare the volumes of deleted and newly written files - 66.8 and 78.4 MB), since it is highly likely that a large part of the clusters in which the deleted files were originally located ended up being partially overwritten when copying with other data. Then we subjected the experimental media to the analysis of each of the utilities discussed in the article in order to search for accidentally deleted files (the Delete_files folder), after which, as far as possible, we tried to recover the deleted files. Finally, we conducted an experiment to identify lost files and folders (Chipset folder).
According to the test results, it is clear that any of the considered utilities can be successfully applied to recover just deleted data. And it is equally obvious that the result of restoring such files after being written to disk new information with an impressive volume (that is, when some of the sectors were overwritten) is disappointing. All this only confirms the important rule recovery: do not write anything to the media and generally stop any work with it immediately after the emergency.
As for the recovery of files and folders lost after formatting, then the results are ambiguous. The MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition and Handy Recovery programs coped best with the task, but using the Recuva utilities for these purposes, and even more so Pandora Recovery turned out to be problematic due to the lack of folder structure and file names in their scanning reports. In addition, Pandora Recovery also has more The situation is aggravated by the fact that the list of formats supported by Deep-scanning is rather limited. Although these programs should not be discounted, they are one of the best free software products in their class, which are very easy to use and do an excellent job of restoring "freshly deleted" files.
Conclusion
Gone are the days when you always had to turn to professionals to recover lost files, and this event cost a pretty tidy sum. Today, there are quite a few fairly easy-to-use utilities on the market that allow you to return files that were accidentally deleted or lost as a result of a computer failure, virus attack, or other computer cataclysm. Some solutions are offered at affordable prices for home users or are free for non-commercial use. Therefore, in simple situations, when it comes to accidental deletion or loss of files, for example, as a result of a quick format, it makes sense to restore the data yourself. But if the reason for the loss of files is damage to the hard drive at a mechanical or electronic level, then you should not experiment - it is better to entrust the data recovery operation to professionals.
When restoring on your own, you should act wisely and take care in advance that such a cataclysm does not take you by surprise. In other words, it is worth keeping at hand (that is, on the disk in the installed form) a couple of suitable utilities and, if possible, resort to data recovery as soon as possible in compliance with all mandatory rules (exclude the possibility of writing other data to a storage medium, save the recovered files to another carrier, etc.). In addition, if you fail with one utility, be sure to give another a chance - they have different media scanning algorithms, so it is possible that the work of the second utility will be more successful. And finally, do not forget that not a single, even the most expensive and powerful solution guarantees absolute success, and therefore no one has canceled the reservation of valuable data.
