Recuva is remarkably effective for its price (free/$25 for Pro). In controlled tests, it consistently recovers recently deleted files from mechanical hard drives (HDDs) with a success rate exceeding 90%. Its Deep Scan can often pull entire directory structures from formatted USB sticks or memory cards.
Recuva exploits this window of opportunity. It scans the drive at a low level, bypassing the operating system’s logical view of what files “exist.” It looks for file headers, footers, and directory structures left behind. When it finds a match, Recuva reconstructs the file’s data clusters and reassembles them into a usable file. The software’s key innovation is its mode. A standard quick scan checks the master file table for deleted entries, which is extremely fast (seconds to minutes). The Deep Scan, however, ignores the file table entirely, scanning every sector of the drive for known file signatures (e.g., JPEG headers “FF D8 FF,” PDF headers “%PDF,” or Word document headers). This process is exhaustive—taking hours on a large drive—but can recover files that were deleted months ago, from formatted drives, or from severely corrupted file systems. piriform software recuva
Click "Start." Recuva will scan the selected location. Once finished, it takes you to the results screen. Recuva is remarkably effective for its price (free/$25
If you continue to use the computer, save new files, or browse the internet, you create new data. This new data may land on that "available" space, overwriting your deleted file. Once overwritten, the file is gone forever. Recuva exploits this window of opportunity
You have found your files. Now, how do you get them back?
Before committing to recovery, Recuva attempts to generate a thumbnail or text preview of the deleted file. For photos, it shows the actual image; for text files, the first few lines. This saves users from recovering corrupted or irrelevant data.