MobileTechTalk Sitting comfortably? Good, I’ll begin my little tale. Once upon a time, on a small Tech-based website, an author was attempting to finish a review. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the data on his 1TB drive was no more. Now, I won’t bore you with the details of how we got to that point; suffice to say it was painful. Anyway, I just wanted to show some of the functions of EaseUS Data Recovery for Windows as it saved my bacon!
Okay, let me start with the fact that we didn’t actually lose 1TB of data. It was me; I lost around 250GB of data due to a number of more nuanced reasons that are inconsequential now. However, I had used previously, and now continue to use, EaseUS Data Recovery software to help me claw back deleted files from a drive. I just wanted to share a quick review of it with you as it’s a bloody life saver!
EaseUS have a number of software titles ranging from mobile-based products for Android and iOS as well as MacOS and Windows products, and their Recovery suite of applications all, more or less, deliver the same functionality. Recover data from somewhere where previously there was said data. There are a few exceptions though. Again, without going over the technicalities, when you delete files, they are still there, the space they take up on the drive is simply flagged for being able to be overwritten and considered ‘free’ space, so as long as this hasn’t occurred you can normally drag back your files from the dead (read more about Recovery technology here).
Scan Your Disk
The first thing to do when you want to recover deleted items is stop installing new ones to that drive. Immediately. Just stop. You don’t want to risk overwriting the location of your to-be-restored file(S). Install the EaseUS Data Recovery software on another drive if you can help it, or just risk it and use the same drive.
You can then choose a disk to scan. The first scan, a ‘Quick Scan’ will be, as the name suggests, quite quick. It does an initial scrape of your hard drive to see what deleted fragments it can find. On NTFS file systems (and a few others) it’s helped by flags helping to identify these fragments. Older file systems might take more time. A ‘Deep Scan’ will continue to ensure a more granular scan is undertaken for deleted files. Coincidentally, this was what I had to wait for in order to retrieve the images and video files deleted, prompting this post.
Your files file be listed in a Windows Explorer-esque display with some files/folders denoted by a little ‘d’ on the icon, being marked as those found that had been deleted. Once the scan is complete, preview the file(s) you want to recover and then simply recover them to a desired location.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to use a tool like this in both personal and professional circumstances and I’ve said it before, but I’ll restate, it has been nothing short of a life saver in certain scenarios!
You can grab a free version of EaseUS Data Recovery from their website, as well as pickup the more feature-laden Pro version. I personally would go with the Pro version if you have data accessed by a number of people as you never know when you’ll need the expertise the application delivers to get your data back.
