PhotoRec is a powerful, free data recovery software which has been made to recover all your lost data on your computer. These could be anything from a simple document to a video or images. You can use this free digital image recovery software to recover images from your hard disks, CD-ROMs or any other form of data storage compatible with your computer. The software has been built on the platform where it ignores your system while going after the underlying data. Thus this means that even if the media file system is damaged or reformatted the software would perform all its functions.
Installing PhotoRec
In order to install this free Data recovery software, you need to visit the link here. Once you are on the website, just visit the download page and click on the download link against TestDisk & PhotoRec 6.14-WIP, Data Recovery. This pack comes with three software inside a zipped in rar file. You would be required to unzip it and launch the Photrec.exe application to use the free digital image recovery software. If you are interested to check out some more file recovery software, you can try ToolWiz File Recovery, Orion File Recovery and Pandora File Recovery.
Interface of PhotoRec
Launching the program you would notice a DOS window popup on the screen. The black screen interface is all the software has where it performs all the activities as per the instructions provided by you.
Using data recovery software
Most of us are aware that our computer stores files in data blocks which is often referred to as clusters. While we use our systems and carry out day to day operations we may delete several files and data. Although they might seem to have been deleted the extension, file name, as well as the file is stored in one of the clusters whereas only the first block of the data gets removed. What does this mean? This means that the data which appears to have been deleted is still lying in one of the clusters of our system. So in case you accidentally deleted one of your files and wish to recover them, this free data recovery software provides you the flexibility to recover them with ease.
In order to use this free digital image recovery software, the main screen provides you the place to select the drives present or attached with your computer. Once you select the drive which originally had the data you need to press the enter key to select Proceed. For example if you selected the main hard disk of your system it would open up all the drives and partition you have on your system. Now in the similar manner you move to the drive from where you wish to recover the file and press the enter key to proceed further.
The next step would ask you to select the extension type of the file you wish to recover. There are two options namely:
- Ext2/ext3
- Other: FAT/NTFS/HFS/
Select the appropriate option and press the enter key. The new options provide you to select the option to scan only the unallocated space or the entire sector you are in. Select the one depending on the need and press the enter key. This would list down all the files that had been deleted whereby you would be required to move to the relevant file you wish to recover and press the ‘’c’’ key again. This starts off the recovery process and all the files relevant to the section you chose would start being recovered. You can access the files recovered by the recovery folder as stated in the window after the entire recovery process completes. Now that you know all about PhotoRec, you can use this freeware to recover your files.