has any one used RECUVA prog to restore files

[jamoskeag3]

I'd be interested in any comments on how well RECUVA works for restoring deleted files. Its freeware.
Thanks in advance.
Jamoskeag

[MilesAhead]

I haven't tried it enough to give any opinion. On other boards I've seen people enthusiastic about it though. What OS are you using? If Vista or W7 you may be able to use ShadowExplorer. Using it is similar to using an undelete. But of course you need to have a restore point with the version of the file you want. On the plus side, if the file is there then it tends to be a whole uncorrupted file since it was saved when the restore point was made.

Another way I bail out of accidentally deleted files is mounting a Macrium Reflect image as a drive letter. Then I can copy out a file from the partition the image was made from.

As with any deletion recovery though, it's probably best to use one that has a portable version on a USB stick. If you undelete right after the deletion you may be able to get the whole thing back. The longer the system has run and the more disk activity though, the greater the chance parts of the file have been overwritten.

[dr_ml422]

Piriform makes this though I just use Ccleaner and on occasion Defraggler. I played w/Recuva then decided that a solid backup w/any number of ways was best for anything deemed important. Main reason being exactly what Miles pointed to about the integrity of the deleted file after recovery if any. I usually do a shift/delete to bypass the recycle bin so it's either lingering in the hdd somewhere in some state or totally messed up.

Aside from something you didn't do to accidentally delete it my best suggestion is to back up w/e you deem important no matter what. That's the best and surest recovery barring something messing that up.

[MilesAhead]

For files you are editing you could try something like Tidy that reformats the text, then saves a numbered backup. Might help with accidental deletions. Also a guy wrote some command line utilities to copy files with numbered versions like the old VMS file system used to. But it requires command line copy to do backups. It would be nice if the file system did it for you automatically though. Here's the page for the VMS inspired tools:

http://glindra.org/index.html