Recuva () is an

undeletion Undeletion is a feature for restoring computer files which have been removed from a file system by file deletion. Deleted data can be recovered on many file systems, but not all file systems provide an undeletion feature. Recovering data witho ...

program for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, developed by

Piriform Software Piriform Software Ltd is a British software company based in London, owned since 2017 by Avast which itself become part of NortonLifeLock (now Gen Digital) in 2022. The company develops cleaning and optimisation tools for Microsoft Windows, macO ...

. It is able to undelete files that have been marked as deleted; the operating system marks the areas of the disk in which they were stored as free space. Recuva can recover files deleted from internal and external

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

USB flash drive A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since firs ...

memory card A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...

portable media player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...

s or all random-access storage mediums with a supported file system. Preview thumbnails of intact photos can be displayed in grid view mode and in the side bar. Recuva was described by vnunet.com as an "effective tool for undeleting or salvaging files we sent for recycling and deleted, in the past". The program works on

FAT In nutrition science, nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such chemical compound, compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers spec ...

exFAT exFAT (Extensible File Allocation Table) is a file system introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards. exFAT was proprietary until 28 August 2019, when Microsoft published its specificati ...

and NTFS file systems of

. It is able to recover lost directory structure and automatically renames files when trying to recover two files of the same name. As of version 1.5.3 it can also recover files from Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4 file systems of

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. As with other file recovery programs Recuva works by looking for unreferenced data, but if the operating system has written new data over a deleted file then recovery will often not be possible.

References

External links

* Windows-only freeware 2007 software Data recovery software Piriform Software Gen Digital software {{Software-stub

See also

References

External links