Best Free Data Recovery Software For windows

Free Data recovery Software for windows to recover your deleted files from hard disk, memory cards, external USB storage devices. It’s a nightmare for any computer users when a file gets deleted either accidentally, virus infection or due to system crash or due to data corruption as it might happen if you unplug your external USB device without using the “Safely remove hardware” feature of windows.

There are many free as well as paid versions of Data recovery software for windows  available that can help you to recover your accidentally deleted files. Files when deleted from hard disk or from recycle bin on your hard disk (USB drive, memory card etc) don’t get deleted completely,its there but not visible to the OS. These can easily be recovered almost completely with these Data recovery software.

Note: The sooner the better. Once files are deleted do not install any other software, do not format for best result and use data recovery software as soon as possible to avoid windows writing over data. This will further ensure proper and full data recovery. 

RECUVA is such a tool, a Free data recovery software for windows, that comes to the rescue. Today I would like share the portable version of this FREE software, a wonderful tool that saved my day. You can read a separate post on the Standalone version of this software. Recuva Portable, which can be carried on your USB pen drive and can be used on any windows version computer, by just plugging the pen drive and executing the program.

Just yesterday my daughters 1 TB external HDD crashed due to reasons I had no idea because she couldn’t explain. Hundreds of GBs worth, collection of pictures ,videos, MP3 songs just vanished. Quite a few files were still visible but couldn’t be opened (corrupted beyond repair). I had with me the Portable version of Recuva (I always carry with me most essential Portable tools with me (you too should do that), as you never know when these might come in handy and this was one of those situation. 

RECUVA portable is a small application less than 2 MB in size, comes in zip format. Download it (Link given below) and save it on your hard disk. Plug in your USB pen drive and unzip the content on the pen drive. The application comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

The software do not require to be installed. Unzip the content of the zip folder on to your USB pen drive.Now plugin the external Drive to you computer(in my case its an external hard disc) if its your memory card you can do so or any other device from where you want to recover you data. In windows explorer Open your USB drive (where you have unzipped the Recuva portable earlier) and from there start the appropriate version of the software (32 or 64 bit) and you will see the window shown on the left.

Click on the next button. In the next window, you will be presented with the option “what kind of file are trying to recover”. Click on the radio button to choose the type of file you want to recover, like Pictures, Music, Documents, Videos, Compressed files, E-mails and others. Than click on the next button.

In the next step it will ask for the “File Location, where were the files” The options here is pretty obvious. You can even browse and specify the drive location if you are recovering data from an external drive or a attached memory card.

Than click on the next button. Recuva is ready to scan and recover your deleted files.

Optionally you can enable for “Deep scan” which takes longer time but does a very thorough scan and recovers almost all files intact. I would suggest you enable deep scan here, which will give you the best possibilities of recovering your lost data’s.                                                                                                        

                                                                                                               Than click on the “Start” button.

Now you can sit and relax, the program will scan and recover as much as data’s that is recoverable and the time taken may range from one hour to a couple of hours depending upon the number of files and also the size of the disk/media you are scanning.

After the scan is completed, which may take from a few minutes to few hours depending on the number of files and also the size of the drive, the program shows you a list of files found. Files which are intact and in good condition will be marked as a green button. You will need to put a check mark against files you want to recover and than click on the recover button. Specify the location where you want to save the recovered files and click on next. Now you just have to wait and let the software do the rest.

In my Daughters external HDD I had to wait for nearly five hours to recover more than 250 GBs of data. (Pictures,Videos,MP3). But it was worth the wait, this software recovered nearly 95% of the deleted/corrupted content. I was amazed that all the video files recovered were in perfect condition and played smoothly without any frame break.

NOTE: Do not save the recovered data on the same disk from where you are recovering data.Make a folder on a separate partition and save there. 

As I said at the beginning of this article there are many freeware’s for data recovery, but I found this RECUVA data recovery software as one of the best and quite fast too, being able to recover different types of data at the same time without any error or hang-ups. 

Type : Freeware

OS : Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit)

Download the latest version of       RECUVA PORTABLE     

Was this post helpful ? Which free data recovery software for windows, did you try ? Your opinion will be appreciated. Share with a comment.

Posted By: Ben Jamir