2 Free Utilities to Recover Deleted Files

How many times has it happened? You made a great power-point, capable of blowing away your lecturer’s mind, and then just went away for a hard-earned, goo-night’s sleep. In the mean, your younger sibling comes up, deletes the file, ‘by mistake’, and an elder comes and clears up the recycle bin, ‘to make more space!’ What to do? How to recover the file? Well here are 2 utilities that should help you.Of course paid softwares like Undelete from Diskeeper et al exists, but hey the best things in life are free, aren’t they? So here are two utilities that will help you (most possibly will!) to recover any file that you might have accidently (or not) deleted.

The first software that I would like to introduce to you is FileWing from Abelssoft. A free and fast software, it scans your hard disk for any remains of your deleted files and sends the status of that file to you. You can filter out your file from the list of files that it provides you with. You can download it from here.

The next one is a software from the creators of the great Ccleaner, Piriform called as Recuva. Like CCleaner it is fast and light-weight and very handy software to be at hand. Again like FileWing it scans a disk and then presents a list of files of which recovery is possible (but not garunteed.) You can download it from here.

Testing:
For simple testing of these softwares, I created a two 40 KB Word 2007 file, containing 287 pages or 206,007 words. I’ve named them as Can you recover me1.docx and Can you recover me2.docx to to differentiate between which files either of the softwares recover.

So here are how both the softwares fared after deleting the docx files and deleting them from the recycle bin as well.

• FileWing – Well, surprise!  FileWing couldn’t find any file on my C drive (the drive from where I deleted the document!) Let’s see what recuva could come up with.
• Recuva – Well on a normal scan Recuva couldn’t find any file on my C drive either. But once I enabled the deep scan option, it did find the document, but marked it as unrecoverable.

But then too, just for the fun of it I recovered it. And quite rightly so, the file was corrupted.

Well the recovery of a file has many factors dependent on it – the time that has passed since the file was deleted, whether any other data has over-written it, the type of disk and file-system etc. Why I just recovered a photo that I had deleted nearly a month ago in perfect condition!

So you see, it all depends on luck I guess! So you’ve got any tips? Please do share.