How To Recover Lost or Deleted Files – Free Data Recovery

Losing precious data can be quite a headache. Most of the time it isn’t in our hands, but sometimes even the best of us delete files by accident. Data recovery solutions can often complicated and are even expensive. So we’re going to tell you to how to recover lost or deleted files for free! We will be using a tool called Recuva by Piriform, the same company that made the excellent CCleaner. You can download Recuva for free from here, it’s less than 3 Mb! Once it’s downloaded and installed, we can begin trying to recover your lost data.

How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files Using Recuva:

Step 1 – Download and install Recuva from the link mentioned above.

Step 2 – Start the application, you should see a wizard like the picture below. Simply follow the steps on screen to recover your files. If you can’t recover them through the wizard, there’s also an alternate advanced UI which we will be using because it offers more options.

Step 3 – Either click cancel when the wizard starts up or click “Switch to advanced mode” after running the wizard unsuccessfully. You should see an interface like the one below.

Step 4 – If you have a specific location in mind, set that disk in the first drop down menu. In the “Filename or path” drop down menu, select the type of file you’re looking to recover. Now, you can either scan for deleted files through the “Scan” drop down menu or scan contents via a search string. Begin the scan by selecting either one option.

Step 5 – Recuva will search for deleted files and display them here. You can sort files according to name, size, state, path, last modified or comment. If you find the file you’re looking for and it’s recoverable (check via the state data), simply click “Recover” to get back your file!

Step 6 – Now, if none of these options find your file, you can decide to go deeper (no Inception reference intended). With your search criteria set as above, go to “Options” –> “Actions” and check the “Deep Scan” option. Note that this can significantly increase scan time. If you’re looking to recover data from a damaged or reformatted disk, check the “Scan for non-deleted files” option. Recuva will now display files that don’t show up in Windows Explorer but are actually present on the disk. It’s an immense help for people trying to recover data from a lost/damaged partition.

Once all your options are selected according to your needs, click recover and relax, Recuva will get back the files if it can. If you’re uncomfortable with using the advanced mode, the Wizard will do just fine, although you will have to set it to check for non-deleted files through the advanced mode. So that’s how to recover lost or deleted files, do let us know if you have any comments or queries!