Category Archives: free file recovery

WD MyBook Live drives wiped – Data Recovery

Earlier this week ‘rumors‘ started spreading about WD MyBook Live NAS devices were remotely instructed to return to factory settings. Well, this is no longer a rumor, it is happening. I write this blogpost as I learn new stuff about this issue so nothing of this is written in stone and I will update and… Read More »

Recover lost or deleted Bitcoin Wallet.dat using R-Studio

While this blog post covers my initial ‘research’, intention of this blog is to give an easier to digest guide into recovering or undeleting a Bitcoin wallet.dat file. Note that if you delete files or lose files due to formatting on a SSD, they are beyond DIY Recovery!! In that case you increase chances of… Read More »

Recover photos from a hard drive

When choosing the best photo recovery software it’s important to consider from what type of drive you need to recover from. To recover photos from a hard drive, in 9 out of 10 cases generic file recovery software will do better, give less fuzz and be quicker than specialized photo recovery software. In advance: SSD… Read More »

Accidentally deleted pictures from SSD. Recovered but they’re corrupted.

Case study, Story goes like: Accidentally deleted some pictures. Recovered them but they’re corrupted. Anyway to fix it? “I used Recuva to recover a good chunk of my pictures that were deleted but it seems that even though the file was recovered I can’t view its contents? Any program that helps with this? They were… Read More »

Recover deleted DCIM folder on android mobile phone (Samsung)

Original question: Help, I deleted my entire DCIM folder from mobile phone (Samsung) Micro SD Card. Can I recover my photos? A typical answer to this question in many forums and communities is, pull the SD Card from the phone and run PhotoRec. This is indeed an option, but I’m not sure if it’s the… Read More »

My r/datarecovery subreddit FAQ

For over 20 years I have been developing, been involved in development of and supporting data and file recovery software. Some very specific incidents sparked my interest in data recovery and then I wanted to find out how data was stored and lost on and from hard drives. The first tools I wrote were DOS tools… Read More »

Professional grade data recovery software on a budget

Who does not want it, professional grade data recovery software on a budget when you have an immediate need for it? Forget Stellar, forget the Disk Drill and RecoverIt! Although I have been and still am an enthusiastic advocate for ReclaiMe File Recovery, I try to keep an open mind and test other tools regularly.… Read More »

Is ReclaiMe still the recommended all-round data recovery tool?

The best all-round data recovery tool for end users. Every now and then I test against updated versions of most popular file recovery software out there. Until now updated versions of Stellar, Clever Files (Disk Drill), Easeus, Minitool etc. did not make me change my mind. In fact, some of the updated versions feel like… Read More »

Disk Drill Review | A real review (2 & 4)

Disk Drill Review: The other week I was given a PRO license for Disk Drill Pro by my buddy Luke Coughey from https://www.recoveryforce.com/. Yes, this is legal, he was offered licenses to give away for promotional purposes. I have looked at Disk Drill in the past and it appears not much has changed since. Which… Read More »

JPEG photo recovery from sd card using Piriform Recuva

Recently I was offered a batch of corrupt JPEGs for repair that were recovered from a SD card using Piriform’s Recuva. The recovered files were not recognized by any image viewer as valid JPG files. This does not appear to be an uncommon thing. Recuva is a popular and the go-to file recovery tool for… Read More »