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Lost or deleted files or data? You need our Top 5 free file recovery tools.
Whether it’s due to a virus, hardware failure, or just good old human error, it’s all too easy to lose vital files. That critical report you’ve got to deliver tomorrow; the huge end of year paper; your massive music collection; or those precious family photos… nightmare! But don’t worry, help is at hand! When a file is deleted, it isn’t actually erased immediately. Instead, the space it occupies is marked as available to be overwritten, which means it can (in most cases) be restored using recovery software. Phew!
So, without further ado, here’s our list of the five best free data recovery software titles – that might just save the day. And don’t forget, you can download them all now, here on FileHippo.
Recuva
Fast, effective and of course, free, Recuva (pronounced "recover") is made by Piriform, the same people behind the hugely popular CCleaner, so you can be assured of its quality, which is a strong start! Simple to use, thanks to its Windows like interface with ‘List’ and ‘Tree’ view, Recuva can restore all types of files, office documents, images, video, music, email, the full shebang. It can also recover data from removable media including SD or CF memory cards, USB sticks, and hard drives. One of the features we really love, is the traffic light system Recuva uses to indicate the quality of the data it can retrieve and how likely it is that the file can be recovered successfully. For those in the know, it supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, NTFS5, NTFS and EFS file systems. If you don’t know or care what that means, don’t worry! Just know that it’s a great data recovery solution.