It is unusual for a recovery lab to post such a resource: a guide not to hire one. However, if you answer these four questions you will determine if a free download is your best next step for recovering your lost files, or the action that makes a recoverable file loss a permanent one.
Drive silent and stable? No longer using it? Tool installed elsewhere? Data saved elsewhere? All four yeses and a download is a good bet. One no and it is no longer one.
This single mechanic is responsible for everything each tool does as well as everything each tool cannot do.
When you delete a file (or run a quick format on a memory card), nothing gets wiped. The computer merely removes the file name from the directory list and marks the area as available to write to by another program or file. Until then, the individual bytes remain right where they were. Recovery programs take advantage of that gap: they search beyond the directory listing and read the unformatted area (the raw disk space). This is why they are so effective with healthy equipment, and each time you make a save, install, launch a web browser (idle), etc., you’re slowly erasing some of the files you want to recover.
None of this is paid for by sponsors, nor are any products available for purchase through us: simply what works best for the task at hand.
Camera-card photos → PhotoRec. Free, open-source (no limits) and amazingly good at reconstructing images and video from flash data. It will look like a command prompt from 1995 but don’t let that fool you. A partition that vanished → TestDisk. Same authors as above. The go-to free fix for when an entire drive letter vanishes. A file you deleted on a working Windows PC → Recuva. This program is easy to use and very quick with anything you lost recently.
The paid tools that offer disk recovery (Disk Drill, EaseUS and Recoverit) all work fine but be aware of how they describe ‘free’ versions prior to spending hours scanning your entire drive. They all will scan your entire drive and list every single thing they find. But once you see what they found, they limit how much data you can recover (often in the hundreds of MBs, occasionally a couple of GBs) until you purchase a licence. The model makes sense; however, hitting that limit at midnight right after viewing the files is not a fun experience. Check first.
Three things we look at when something walks through the door after a person downloaded something first.
The drive that was making noises and got scanned regardless. Clicks and buzzes are mechanical, and full scans take hours of the type of read a broken mechanism cannot handle; many times we have seen hard drives mostly recoverable upon arrival but after a full third pass through they were much less so. The SSD where the delete was real. Internal SSDs utilise TRIM, which deletes the blocks that have been removed immediately. Usually there will be little to nothing to recover from, and no software will rewrite what has already been removed. (A dead SSD is the opposite: a failed controller leaving the data intact behind it, and this would be bench work.) The recovery that landed on top of itself. The scan successfully completed and then rewrote the results onto the remaining files yet to be recovered. There is only one rule for the whole job: do not ever write to the patient drive.
For the full story about how DIY fails and when the lab steps in, see our software-versus-professional guide which continues this story.
Yes, absolutely, for your intended use case (files you’ve deleted, or media you’ve formatted, on hardware that is functioning properly), these tools are correct, safe choices. PhotoRec and TestDisk are two examples of the right, catch-free choices. There is one limitation of every download (repairing faulty hardware): a clicking, dropped or vanishing drive is physically failing, and running a scan against it is the best way to turn a partial failure into a complete failure.
The scanner will read but can’t write so by itself, there is no way it will (as long as three things are true): you have installed the software on another drive, you save your findings on another drive, and the patient drive is physically healthy. If you fail at one of the first two, you will overwrite what you’re looking for; if you fail the third then with each pass the problem becomes more deeply ingrained into the disk.
Match the right tool to the failure. Images from a camera card: use PhotoRec. When you can’t find the partition you used to be able to see, try TestDisk. If you have a Windows machine, and you just accidentally deleted some files, but your hard drive still works (it has a good health status), there’s a program called Recuva. Any time your hard drive makes any noise whatsoever, don’t even bother using these programs; instead turn it off.
Tell us what the problem with your device is, and an engineer will tell you if software would put your data in danger, all without having to run one single scan and potentially putting something at risk.