FREE Data Recovery Even After Formatting!!

did you accidentally delete something that you really need or format the wrong hard drive well not all hope is lost because today I'm going to show you how to recover it for free stay tuned [Music] we've all been there before accidentally deleted the wrong file and didn't realize until after the recycle been emptied or thought we were formatting a thumb drive and turned out that was actually our Data Drive stupid mistakes like this happen all the time but it doesn't have to be permanent it is possible to recover deleted files and even possible to recover deleted data from a formatted drive today I'm going to show you how and even better it won't cost you a single dime but first we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under 20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video I can't tell you how many times I've had a customer call me after they brought their computer to a local Big Box store with a tech department panicking because the kid behind the counter formatted his hard drive without backing his data up first believe it or not this is actually quite common you remember that release of liability that you signed when you dropped your computer off yeah that that releases them of liability in regards to your data it's also not uncommon for inexperienced technicians to just wipe a computer and reload Windows when they're trying to fix a simple problem in fact it happens so often that I have an entire playlist showing how to fix broken window systems without formatting so you know what don't be that guy learn how to fix Windows believe it or not you rarely have to format a computer to fix it and if you think about it though formatting really isn't fixing it it's kind of giving up and starting over you know unfortunately though if that happens to you then the chances of recovering from it are pretty slim but I have done it successfully in the past the reason we are able to recover deleted files is because when you delete a file it doesn't really delete the file it only deletes the record where the file was stored on the hard drive the data for the file itself is typically still present at least on the drive because of this we can use special software to find that file and recover it however this is only possible if you recover that file as soon as possible you see once the record for where that file is stored is deleted that space on the drive is considered free space and it can be overwritten at any time once that happens the chances of recovering the data are literally zero now you might remember just a minute or two ago that I mentioned that I have in the past successfully recovered data from a computer that has been formatted and reloaded with Windows you might be wondering how that's possible considering Windows being reloaded would have overwritten the data on the drive well you see that's exactly why I said the chances of recovering data are pretty slim but not impossible you see when Windows is reloaded it doesn't take the entire Drive there's still a chance that your data could still be residing on the free space that's left on that drive at least some of your data that is for this reason it's at least worth trying to recover your data back with this method if that's happened to you now for our purposes we need a drive that has some data on it so what I'm going to do is use this 32 gig micro SD card with a bunch of Windows backgrounds on it primarily because the amount of time it takes to recover data depends more on the size of the drive not the size of the data you're recovering so this is just a way to make my job a little bit easier while filming this video however this process works exactly the same on any storage device so let's jump on the computer here and I'll show you how to do it okay so we're here in Windows 11 but this will work in any version of Windows I'm just using Windows 11 because this just happens to be the version of Windows that I had on the system for this video so I'm going to go ahead and plug my SSD card in and as you can see this SSD card is full of just a bunch of random Windows backgrounds and as you can see there's 40 items in total inside of this folder right here so what we're going to do is I'm going to show you two methods to recover files the first one is going to be just simply deleted files and then the second one is going to be in a situation where you accidentally format a drive so the first thing that we're going to need to do is get our software real quick so I'm going to go ahead and minimize this and I'm going to open up Chrome here and I'm going to show you some of the options we have now the program that we're going to be using is recuva and if I pronounce that wrong then I'm sorry but it looks like recuva to me if I did pronounce it wrong though however tell me in the comments below how to pronounce it right so this is a free program that you can get from CC cleaner and they do have a professional version but honestly for our use we really don't need the professor National version the free version works just fine and if you want you can scroll all the way down to the bottom here and you can download it right here however I don't recommend downloading the version of recuva from CC cleaner and there's a really good reason why whenever you're recovering data from a hard drive you don't want to write anything to that hard drive because any writing to the drive could write over the data that you're trying to recover what I recommend downloading is this version of recuva from portableapps.com and this one here will actually allow you to set up recuva as a portable application so you don't have to write anything to the hard drive this is the one we're going to be using so I'm going to go ahead and click here to download now and then it should download in a couple of seconds so we're going to go ahead and let that download and then there's a third option that I recommend using as well and that's just simply downloading hiren's boot CD Now hyran's boot CD is a Windows PE install that has tons of different Diagnostic and repair software on it it's a really good distro that you can use and keep around four situations just like this and as you can see it comes with rakuva on the CD so to download this one you just scroll all the way down to the bottom and you click right here to download the iso now I have to reiterate this real quick do not install recuva on a drive that you're trying to recover data from because there's a really good chance that simply installing that program will write over the data that you're trying to recover so I highly recommend at least using the portable version and go ahead and download that from a completely different system copy it to a USB thumb drive or an external drive whatever you plan to recover the data to because you also don't want to recover data to a drive you're trying to recover data from if that makes any sense and it's for the same reason you don't want to write to that drive until you get all your data recovered off of it but optimally hiran's boot CD is the perfect way to do this because you can download the iso burn it to a CD or use a program like Rufus to make a USB out of it and then go ahead and use that to recover data from but still do all of that from a different computer not the computer you're trying to recover data from so let's get back to it okay so we can go ahead and go to our download folder right here and download there's where our download is stored for recuva now I'm breaking my own rules right now by downloading this to the system I'm recovering data from but that's okay because I'm going to be recovering data from an SD card so if that's the case you just don't want to install anything to a drive that you're currently trying to recover data from so in order to use the portable version just go ahead and click on it and it goes through a regular setup process however it's not really setting it up it's actually just creating a portable copy of the program so once it's done go ahead and hit finish and you should be left with a folder right here when you open this folder it'll have all of the necessary data in it to be able to run the app so that now that we've done that we'll go ahead and minimize this and we've got to give ourselves a problem to recover data from so the first one I'm going to show you is what happens if we simply delete files that are on a storage device so on this case I'm going to go ahead and highlight all of these pictures right here so we've got 40 items selected and say we just hit the delete button and hit yes and we delete all the files from the drive so as you can see this is an SD card so because it's an SD card there's nothing in the recycle bin so I'm going to go ahead and empty the recycle bin anyway just to show you it's completely empty so from this point now in order to recover this what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to go back to our program right here I'm going to go ahead and run it right here you run the RCV portable right here to run the program and then from here it should give us recuva now what I would do is I would go ahead and cancel this wizard we don't need the wizard go ahead and just get to the program itself so the way that we want to do this is we want to First click on the drive that we want to recover from so in this case by default it's set to drive C we don't want that we want D which is our SSD card and then from there don't push scan yet we want to go into options and then there's one option that I highly recommend checking go ahead and go into actions and hit restore file structure and this is if you're restoring a lot of different files and folders you don't want them all thrown into the same directory so by restoring the file structure it should put these files into the folders that they would have originally been in so go ahead and hit OK and then at that point we go ahead and push the scan button and it'll go ahead and scan the drive and as you can see it really didn't take that long we went ahead and scanned it and it gave us a bunch of files that it found so we're going to go ahead and check here to select all of them we're going to push the recover button and then from there we want to make sure to recover these files to a drive that isn't the one we're recovering files from that's really really important so in my case I'm going to go to my desktop but if you're recovering documents from your C drive then make sure to restore these documents to another Drive completely either a spare Data Drive or to a completely different drive like a USB drive or something like that so I'm going to click on desktop create new folder hit OK and then it'll go ahead and recover the files and from that point we can hit OK we can go ahead and close the program so now if we go into this folder as you can see there's our 40 items right there all recovered and looks like they're all perfectly good we'll go ahead and open a couple of them here just to make sure and there you go looks like it worked just fine all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to take all of these files and we want to copy them back to our SSD card or SD card so I'm going to go ahead and do that right now we're going to drag these drag it back onto the SD card and it's going to take a minute to write and there we go all right so now that we have them back on the SD card I want to go to this PC and I want to eject the card and the reason why I'm ejecting the card I'm gonna go ahead and unplug it and plug it back in and the reason why I ejected the card first was because I wanted to make sure that any caching was done prior to what we're going to do next because what we're going to do next is going to damage this card pretty considerably so from this point I'm going to go ahead and close this and as you can see we have all of our files on here and in good shape so the next step is going to be to right click and hit format and then we're going to hit start and we're going to go ahead and format this drive and as you can see format's complete we can open it up and all of our files are gone so now I'm going to go ahead and take our old temporary folder I'm going to throw this one away and I'm going to come here and we're going to and go back into recuva here and then what we want to do is say yes to the user account control just like before and like before we're going to cancel the wizard now there's a couple settings that we need to do a little bit different if we're dealing with a formatted drive so the first one is we want to select the drive obviously and then we want to go into options and click on actions now what you want to do is this very last setting right here where it says scan for non-deleted files we want to go ahead and check that and also it's a good idea to check for deep scan also and by doing a deep scan it's going to be able to find a lot more files than it would normally so I would recommend this in cases of formatting so once we have both those checked we're going to hit OK and just like before we're going to hit the scan button okay so it's going to take a minute for us to recover these files we're just going to have to wait it out for it to do the Deep scan and that's to be expected and that's the reason why I picked an SD card for this video instead of a regular hard drive because as you can see we have about five minutes left and to wait before this recovery is done if I picked a one terabyte hard drive and it could have been about two hours and it would have taken me all day to film this video and I wanted to get it done quicker so we did an SD card instead so I'm going to go ahead and speed up time and I'll meet you back in Windows once the recovery is done okay so the recovery it's found a bunch of files here so if we scroll down here as you can see we have looks like 41 files that found on the drive so we're going to go ahead and check all of these right here and we're gonna just like before we're gonna hit the recover button and I have to reiterate this again you do not want to recover these to any drive that you're currently trying to recover data from that is extremely important I can't say it enough do not recover these files to the original location go ahead and copy them to a completely different storage device so I'm going to click on desktop create a new folder and then from there hit OK and it's going to go ahead and recover the files and then from that point we can go ahead and close the program and we can open up this new folder and as you can see we've got a couple different folders in here we have it looks like it recovered some documents from the system volume information which is WP settings dat and that we really don't care about this is the one we're interested in so it says unknown folder because obviously it came from a formatted drive so it had no idea what the original folder was so if we open this up as you can see we do have all of our documents but there is some slight problems here as you'll notice all of the naming is completely wrong these are not what the original names were and this is really common when you get to file recovery on a drive that's been formatted unfortunately it's lost the original names of these documents but as you can see the pictures themselves are just fine they just don't have their original names anymore in this case we only had 40 items and we recovered 40 items so we got them all back however in a case where you have an entire drive with thousands of different documents and different types of documents this can be a little annoying but at least you get your data back it's better than not getting it back at all I guess so as you can see it is possible to recover deleted data even from a formatted Drive the trick is to get the data back as soon as possible I mean seriously I can't reiterate this point enough if you've accidentally deleted your data or formatted a hard drive with important data on it the very first thing you need to do is shut your computer off as fast as you can simply pulling the plug out of the wall is not inappropriate in these cases the least amount of activity on the drive as possible will increase the likelihood of getting that data back and as I stated earlier I would highly recommend doing this from hyran's boot CD instead of running it directly off of your computer because simply installing recuva on your computer could overwrite the data that you're trying to get back also Windows uses free hard drive space for all sorts of tasks it's constantly writing log files or adjusting the size of the swap file all of which could be overriding your data without you even knowing it but if you have no other alternative than to use the computer that you're trying to restore data from then download the portable version of recuva from another computer and copy it to a thumb drive or an external hard drive as I stated before saving everything to that external storage device and don't try to recover the data to the drive you're trying to recover it from now if you were being perceptive during this video you might realize that formatting that old computer and donating it to your local high school doesn't actually delete your data and you would be right now if you'd like to permanently destroy your data without the possibility of recovery then check out this video where I show you how to use freely available tools to do exactly that just keep in mind that if you follow those instructions you will make data recovery impossible as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 215,649

Keywords: recover data for free, recover deleted or formatted data for free, data recovery of deleted or formatted data for free, data recovery, free data recovery, get data back, recuva, Hiren’s BootCD PE

Id: vqOJyB8ZVRk

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023