Have you ever deleted a file and then wish you hadn’t? Or had your computer crash or a hard drive fail on you? I’m sure thats a disaster that many of you have experienced – I know I did a few years ago – and it just goes to underline the importance of making regular backups of your important data.
Nevertheless, if you have lost important files and don’t have backups, you’ll need some sort of data recovery solution. They aren’t all made equal but sometimes a free program may be all that you need.
Today I’m looking at one such program – Wise Data Recovery.
To get started simply point your browser to the underlined link above and click on the Download button as per the image below:
When the file has finished downloading click on Open and then you will likely see the warning box below:
Click on Run and the setup procedure will begin.
Follow all the steps of the setup routine and then you’ll be ready to start using the program.
When you first run it you’ll be presented with the screen below.
From here you can choose to scan a specific drive (hard disk or attached USB stick) or you can search every attached storage device based upon specific keywords that you input into the search box on the right hand side.
After performing the search of your choice the screen will update to show you a list of files. In the instance below I have chosen to search all files on my main C: hard drive.
You’ll notice that a large number of deleted files are listed here.
To the left of each file is a coloured button. Anything which is highlighted with a red button is unrecoverable, at least with this program. An amber icon suggests revovery may not be entirely successful and a green button indicates that the file should be ok if recovered.
Chosse which file(s) you wish to recover by clicking on them and then you ought to be able to click on the Recover button in the bottom right hand corner. For some reason this wasn’t working for me but if you right click on a file there is an option to do the same recovery that way and this did indeed work.
Overall I thought the program was pretty good. The files that were marked green that I attempted to recover all worked ok. I would guess a paid solution may yield better results but this program from Wise may just get you out of trouble at zero cost so its well worth giving a try in my opinion.
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Article by Lee Munson
Lee's non-technical background allows him to write about internet security in a clear way that is understandable to both IT professionals and people just like you who need simple answers to your security questions.
Lee has written 2875 awesome articles for us at Security FAQs
