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Recuva is a product of Piriform, Ltd. of 78 York Street, London, United Kingdom.
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Recuva is a product of Piriform, Ltd. of 78 York Street, London, United Kingdom.
So what do you do when you have a hard-drive fail, or you find one of your flash drives is corrupted?
About a week ago I plugged a flash drive into a client’s computer, and in a minute or so, instead of Windows popping up the typical window in which it recognized the drive and prompted you to open it, Windows displayed a message saying that it couldn’t recognize the drive and asking if I wanted to format it. I immediately answered no, and then ejected the drive. I plugged it into another USB hub, but I got the same message. Then I plugged it into a different computer but still got the same message; obviously I had a major problem since I knew the drive contained a number of files I had intended to access.
I have used various data recovery programs in the past, but this time I decided to attempt to recover the 128 GB flash drive using a program called Recuva (which is pronounced "recover") from a company called Piriform which also makes CCleaner. Since I have always found CCleaner a valuable utility to remove unwanted components from my computers, including ‘windows registry entries’ left behind after Windows has removed a program, I thought I would give their data recovery software a thorough workout with this corrupted flash drive. Recuva sells for only $24.95, and so it was worth the relatively small fee and a few hours to see if it would salvage what otherwise appeared to be a flash drive full of lost data.
After download and installation, Recuva opens a simple wizard (Figure 1) that prompts you with questions about the specific drive or type of drive, or the specific file(s) or type of file(s) you are attempting to recover. Once you begin the actually recovery process the time involved will be directly related to the amount of data you are trying to recover. (Figure 2) The type of loss will also determine if the basic scan procedure can do the job, or if you will require more specific advanced forms of ‘deep scanning’.
When Recuva recovers your data it opens a window with a detailed display of the files it finds (Figure 3). Options are available to provide you with detailed information regarding the condition of the file (whether it is intact, or if it was partly overwritten). If you find that some files were not recovered, perhaps due to drive damage, Recuva has several Advanced options that may still be able to recover files that haven't actually been deleted, as well as an option to restore the original folder structure of the source media.
So what about my results? Well, initially the program did not recover any of my data, but under the Advanced option’s deep scan it recovered 1974 files after a little more than 2 hours. Unfortunately file names were not recovered; and so it will take me some time to determine what files are what. I also noticed that not all of the files had the correct file extensions, it may be that Recuva was confused as to some of the QuickBooks files that have a double extension like the *.QBW.nd files, or *QBW.tlg files.
I can’t say that I was totally pleased with my results; however, I have since been able to identify and successfully restore copies of some of the files I was hoping to recover. Many of the files on the flash drive had already been copied to one or more hard drives, so they were not critical to the recovery process.
There are lots of different alternative software programs for data recovery, as well as data recovery services, but for small price Recuva might be worth a try in your own situations, and certainly be considerably cheaper than the alternatives. Will it work for you, or in every situation, I doubt it. I don’t think I would even try using this software for an actual hard drive but for flash drives or other portable media it’s worth a try.
Recuva and CClearner are registered trademarked products of Piriform, Ltd. of 78 York Street, London, United Kingdom.