I used to use an external 80 Gb HD on my Accenture laptop to store many things as training docs, white papers, VMs, etc. and to make a backup of my Outlook files and other important files to protect them in case that my laptop suffer a problem (I had a problem with Pointsec software some months ago and I lost the entire hard disk, I made a backup of my Outlook files 2 weeks before so I “just” lost 2 weeks of mails and My Favorites folder).
Some days ago I had connected my external HD on my laptop when I connected an USB pendrive to copy some photos and go to the shop to print them. Like it was very late and the shop was to close, I connected the USB quickly, opened Windows Explorer, right clicked on USB unit, selected Format, Quick Format and OK. Then I copied the photos, right clicked on USB unit, selected Paste, took the pendrive and ran to the shop.
My surprise started when I arrived to the shop, the employee connected my pendrive to the photo machine and the photos were not on it… In fact, the images didn’t appear and the pendrive was not formatted. What is happening?!?!
Yes, you are right… I didn’t format the pendrive… I formatted the external HD!!!!! yeah, it is as stupid as sounds.
When I arrived to my home I was googling to find a tool (a free tool, of course) to try to recover my HD, after all on the HD I had the only backup of my FY08 mails. Searching, I could find many pay and shareware tools that make a hole scanner on the HD and display a list of files that it can recover. But when you select the files and click on Recover button, the application say “ok man, now you have to go to my site, enter your credit card number and pay a lot of money to recover your files…”. And other freeware tools, make an scanner of the HD but it can’t find anything, just the last files that you deleted or, in case that you formatted the HD, it can’t find anything.
After several days searching and trying several tools I found a free one that solved all my problems: RECUVA.
Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware tool that you can download from this site http://www.recuva.com/ Using it I recovered my Outlook archives and, surprisingly, It founds My Favorites folder (the one that I lost some months ago) and I achieved to recover it too. Could you require more to a freeware tool??
Angel Perez Palacios 