Awesome Freeware: Recuva File Recovery Software

Nothing makes me happier than sharing with you readers a piece of software that is not only amazingly useful but is free, to boot. Today it's called Recuva (pronounced "Recover"), which scours your hard drive for deleted file fragments and undeletes them.

If you're prone to accidentally junking files you really need and emptying the recycle bin frequently, I won't have to sell you on why Recuva is useful. But it's also great for the occasional accidental deletion: Remember, deleting a file in Windows (and emptying the recycle bin) doesn't mean it's gone forever, it's just invisible to the operating system. Recuva (and other file recovery tools) look for file fragments on the hard drive; if they haven't been overwritten already, you can recover them without any loss of data.

Undelete tools are legion, but what makes Recuva so cool is its price. Competing tools like Undelete and various shareware tools can cost anywhere from $20 or $30 to $300 and up, depending on how fancy you want to get. But in my tests Recuva seems to work just as well.

Recuva works on hard drives as well as removable media like SD cards, so if you've accidentally deleted your digital photos, you can use Recuva to get them back. The software downloads quickly, installs easily, and is super simple to use. Give it a whirl next time you've lost something in the digital ether!

Incidentally, Piriform also makes CCleaner, a system cleanup and registry optimizer, that's also free. I've written about it before here and here. And here's another freebie file recovery tool.