Recuva review
Recuva undeletes files; recovers data from corrupted, damaged, and reformatted discs; restores unsaved Word documents; and securely deletes files so they're unrecoverable, even by Recuva. Fast, focused scans find just the files you want and deep Scans find lost, damaged, and deleted files anywhere in your system, including portable, removable, and unmounted drives and even CDs and DVDs.
Pros
Wizard: The Recuva Wizard dialog let us scan All Files or just Pictures, Music, Documents, Video, Compressed, or Emails. We could also scan by File Location ranging from "I'm not sure" to CD/DVD and enable the Deep Scan option.
Context menu integration: The Advanced Options include adding "Scan for deleted files" to Explorer and Recycle Bin context menus.
Portable version: Recuva includes a fully portable version that fits on a USB drive. It runs without an installer, so it can find and recover files in damaged systems.
Cons
Advanced Mode switchback: The Advanced Mode shows file paths, info, and headers in a list view instead of thumbnails, which is fine, except there's no way to toggle back to the normal view.
Online help file: Recuva's Web-based Help file supposedly keeps the download smaller, but including a Help file would take up less space than the portable version that's supposedly useful when Internet connections are down. To us, that seems like a good time to have a local copy of the Help file.
Bottom Line
Like CCleaner, Recuva is fast, reliable, and delivers a lot for freeware. Try it before buying a recovery tool.
