Piriform Recuva File Recovery/Undelete Software to the Rescue

Late last night, while preparing to backup my work from the day, I inadvertently deleted file folders from the source drive instead of the destination drive. Make no mistake - this was a stupid move - done in a tired state of mind. But stupid happens. :)

I had a backup from the previous night, but ... restoring from that backup would would mean that a long day of work was completely lost. As thoughts of the movie "Groundhog Day" were going through my mind, I turned to Piriform Recuva File Recovery software (for Windows).

I loaded the free version of Recuva, selected my undelete-from drive, created a filename filter (*.webp|*.cr2 in this case) and the software went to work. I was presented a list of the filter-matching files able to be restored. I selected the files I wanted restored (click on the first, shift-click on the last and press the space bar), selected the restore-to drive (never the same as the undelete-from drive) and Recuva restored 100% of my just-deleted files. As I had not written any more files to this drive, Recuva was able to completely restore my day's work.

File recovery software should be part of any serious photographer's kit. Piriform Recuva is one such application. SanDisk and Lexar typically ship photo-specific recovery software with their pro-grade memory cards. And I know that many more options are available - with some being more feature-filled than others.

The free version of Recuva includes a filename filter feature that was important to me for this recovery as I needed recover about 1,100 files out of the 106,000 files able to be restored from the drive. I keep the Recuva setup program and the Lexar and SanDisk equivalents on my always-with-me external drive for installation whenever needed.