What Is It?

Recuva is a Portable Freeware Utility designed to very simply find and recover deleted files including photos on your hard drives or removable media including flash memory cards used in digital cameras, PDA’s and mobile phones, etc. It is deceptively simple to use but very effective and with a little experimenting surprisingly powerful. Hopefully this review will reveal a couple of things not obvious in a casual trial.

Having recently permanently deleted (i.e not sent the files to the Recycle Bin) a small test set up then decided I needed to re-run it with the same settings I used Recuva to get back the files. I have used several free and commercial utilities in the past for file recovery and was immediately impressed with the ease of use of Recuva, this prompted me to write this post.

Why Would You Want It?

If you have ever accidentally permanently deleted a file or suffered some hardware failure that has partially corrupted the media or file referencing/indexing system then the first thing you need is a file recovery utility. With a Windows OS a lot of file writing goes on behind the scenes so you should attempt to recover files immediately.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Recovers Deleted Files
• Works with fixed drives and removable Media

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Portable
• Basic Wizard or Advanced Settings
• Simple and Efficient
• Recuva is developed by Piriform who also produce the excellent CCleaner

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Nothing obvious on first testing

More About What it Does in Detail:

The Recuva website gives the following description:

Recuva – File Recovery

Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

There are more details Here:

Support Forum

Beginner’s Guide

How to use Recuva

On running the program the following screens and menus are provided:

(click on any picture to enlarge where necessary)

Wizard

You can choose not to display the wizard at startup if you wish.

Here you can choose the type of files you want. If you need to be more specific you will have this option later, just keep going through the wizard.

Now you can choose the location, being more specific than the “I’m not sure” option will certainly speed things up,

particularly if you choose the “Deep Scan” option which is available on the final wizard screen:

Click the start button and the scanning/analysing phase begins:

When this is finished the basic GUI window is shown:

Basic GUI Screen

This shows the “Thumbnail” view without the Advanced options. At the bottom there are details of the file system and files found plus scan time.

You will also notice that it provides some basic system details in the “Banner” at the top.

Hovering the mouse cursor over any thumbnail shows the following tooltips:

or

So you get instant feedback on which files are recoverable

Using the checkboxes (or selecting files by using left click, Ctrl LEFT Click or Shift Left Click combinations) can be employed to recover the files. If the second highlighting method is used you will need to then use the right click menu to Recover the files. The Recover button at the bottom left only works for files that are “Checked”.

Clicking on the “Switch to advanced mode button changes the screen to show

This provides additional information in a three tabbed pane to the right and selection options for drives and filtering above the Thumbnail view.

The drives dropdown menu allows for the selection of individual or all drives, a set of drives cannot be selected:

Now what I really like is the clever way in which the filter box is set up.

In its most simple mode the filter box displays a generic name for the type of files to be shown. This is preset and cannot be changed in the options.

Clicking on the dropdown arrow shows that the generic types are:

What you can also see in the above screenshot is that the filter details of file types is now displayed using the “pipe” symbol | as a separator. You get the same display if you left click within the filter box, and now you can add/modify/delete to suit your requirements

If you click on the Red X icon the filter is cleared and “Filename or path” is displayed grayed out.

You can now enter your own filters. This takes a bit of experimenting as entering cats.jpg for instance, will find any .jpg file extension with the word cats anywhere in the filename. Using a word without the extension will also find that word in the filename and folder name (path). You can also use the pipe symbol eg cat|dog (no spaces) to find names containing either cat or dog.

There are also two alternative views:

Tree View

and

List View

Each file is given a Status indicated by the coloured icon

• Excellent
• Poor
• Very poor
• Unrecoverable

Right Click Menu

This gives access to various options which can be seen in the screenshot including Secure Delete of files.

Options

These are accessed using the Options button:

Help

The Beginners Guide – Help Menu (downloaded separately from the forum with the portable version – I don’t know if it is included with the installer) provides some useful information in using Recuva:

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

This is a very useful and well thought out program. I have tried several different file recovery programs and I found this easy to use with good options and visual feedback.

Personally I rate this as:

EXCELLENT – Easy to use – Does the Job Efficiently – Good options

What Could Make it be Better?

Boolean Filtering of file names/extensions

Define a set of drives to scan

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Backup – Identify Where the Data Is – Find the Location of Your Information on a Windows Based PC?

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Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

Why I decided to Write This Blog

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Portable Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.