Restoring accidentally deleted files with Recuva

Let’s face it, we’ve all been in a situation where we have accidentally deleted a required file, or lost important files on a ‘dead’ floppy. At this point, most people accept the loss with frustration, thinking that once a file’s gone, it’s gone. Not exactly. From a normal point of view, the file is gone and it’s not possible for the file to be still laying somewhere hidden from you. But from an experience computer person point of view, the file is still around and it’s recoverable IF the cluster hasn’t been overwritten.

Before we can determine how to restore files that were incorrectly deleted, we must first understand how Windows handles deleted files. Many people are unaware that when they delete a file, the file is not actually removed from their hard disk. Instead, Windows just marks the file as being deleted, and treats it as free space, ready to be written over. For this reason, the trick to regaining these deleted files is to restore them before Windows writes over them again. Therefore, it is very possible to be able to restore files that were deleted anywhere from a few minutes ago to a few days ago. Obviously, files deleted more recently are much more probable to be recoverable. If you realize that you accidentally deleted files that you need, it is very important to stop using your computer extensively until they are recovered, because any hard drive action could potentially overwrite the file.

Now you should understand how this works. Most of the software required to recover the files back are shareware. Today I found a FREEWARE utility that does the same with a much simpler graphical user interface.


Recuva (pronounced “recover”), created by the same author as CCLEANER, is a freeware utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Windows 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!

After installation, you’ll only find 2 files in the program folder which is located at C:\Program Files\Recuva that is recuva.exe and uninstall.exe. Recuva.exe is only 180KB and it doesn’t require any other DLL files. You can copy recuva.exe to your thumb drive and run it from there.

The inteface is very simple without any settings needed. Just select the drive that you want to scan and click on the Scan button.

Files that has “Excellent” state and with the comment “No overwritten clusters detected” can be recovered. It is very important not to restore files to the same drive that you are recovering from, as you could very easily overwrite the files you need!

[ Download Recuva ]