Whether you accidentally deleted your files or had your hard disk drive corrupted by a virus or bug, data loss is something that will happen to most people at some point in their lives, unfortunately. Professional data recovery doesn’t come cheap, but you can undertake free data recovery at home.
File recovery can be incredibly expensive, which makes backing up your data on a regular basis incredibly important. But even those with strict backup protocols can fool victim to an unexpected data loss incident. There are lots of causes of hard drive failure - whether it’s a software problem, hardware problem, a virus or malware infection, or plain old human error, there are solutions you can resort to before you consult a professional data recovery specialist.
Recuva
A fast, effective, and – most importantly – free program, Recuva ranks as one of the best free data recovery software. Recuva takes advantage of the fact that when you delete a file, they aren’t actually removed from the hard disk drive. Rather, they remain restorable until the space they take up is overwritten with new data. If you’ve accidentally deleted multiple files, or suffered from a virus, Recuva might be able to get you out of a tight spot. With a wizard that guides you through the data recovery process, the program is simple and easy to use, and features a user-friendly interface. If you find that your hard disk drive or solid state drive contains a lot of data, you can filter by file type or location to find what you want quickly. This will massively speed up the data recovery process by only looking for specific files or folders within the drive. Additionally, Recuva utilises a traffic light system to show the user the quality of the recovered data.
EaseUS
If your data recovery requirements are a bit more advanced, then EaseUS Data Recovery might be the program you should go for. Like Recuva, EaseUS is a powerful data recovery tool that is able to undelete files from a hard disk drive, solid state drive, USB flash drive or SD card. But, though, EaseUS has more capabilities – it can work with devices that are no longer recognised, perhaps due to an accidentally-deleted partition. The powerful file recovery software also allows you to take a disk image and work from that, preserving the original data in the even of a mishap. Running on every version of Windows since 2000, and supporting FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and EXT2/3 file systems, EaseUS will work in just about any data mishap.
Paragon Rescue Kit
With Recuva and EaseUS, we’ve assumed that you are able to actually boot your computer or laptop into Windows – but what if you can’t? This is where Paragon comes in. You need to install the program now (or if you don’t and your computer wont boot, do it from a different machine). You’ll need a blank CD, DVD or USB flash drive with a capacity of 512MB or larger to create your bootable recovery media. Paragon has a wide range of features to help you get your data back and repair logical software problems; you can correct the Master Boot Record if it has become corrupted, or recover an accidentally-erased partition. Because it boots from a key or disk, it can be quite slow, but the file recovery software is easy enough to use.
