Introduction

You are here because you have most likely just encountered a situation in which you have lost important files. It is certainly not comfortable for you and you want to restore your data. It is possible that you have already tried to recover files using various methods (system shell), but it did not bring the expected results. You are asking yourself what now? Is this the end? Regardless of what files have been lost (documents, works, photos, movies), this article is here to help you. You do not have to immediately refer the matter to services, it is important not to do anything rashly. It may turn out that with the help of this guide and a tool such as StrongRecovery, you will recover your files yourself easily, quickly and safely.

Sudden file loss does not necessarily mean irretrievable loss of your data that you care about very much!

Before you begin any file recovery attempts, follow this procedure:

1. The most important thing is to not overwrite the data after it has been lost, i.e. not write anything to the disk, do not format it, do not modify the files on it
2. It is important to recover all important files to a different location than where they were lost. The files must be checked (opened) and only then you can use the disk freely)
3. If data has been lost on Desktop / My Documents, i.e. on the system drive (drive C), you should make sure that no data is written to this drive in any way - we are talking here mainly about indirect writing (one that occurs passively), more on this topic in the article: Data Recovery from Drive C
4. Remember that you can always download the trial version of StrongRecovery to see what the situation is like and recover a few files on a trial basis!

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Step 1

Start StrongRecovery and then select the drive where the files were deleted:

Step 2

After processing the partition header data (processing MFT/FAT) you will see a browser window. Use this window to browse paths/folders with deleted data, you can also preview photos in thumbnail mode (menu->view):

Step 3

Now you can select files and folders to recover using the "Recover" option from the main menu or the context menu of the file list (right mouse button), you will be asked to select the target directory for the files to be recovered, select the disk where you want to save them, remember, the disk should be designed for data recovery (without the risk of overwriting/destroying previously lost or deleted files):

Step 4

StrongRecovery also scans data for raw files - RAW (files to be recovered +). If the scan is completed or RAW files are found satisfactorily (photos or other multimedia), then they can be dumped/recovered. RAW files are searched for by detecting header information (file format) regardless of the file system, so in the event of file system corruption or file data loss (name, date, attributes, allocation data), it is possible to recover them.

The file recovery method described above can be crucial in cases where the disk has been overwritten, and as a result, the file system layer (FAT / NTFS) has been overwritten. If this happens, data recovery using the file system is often impossible. Although this method has its drawbacks (in most cases, the file name cannot be recovered, there is no information about it - such as: attributes, creation date, etc.), its importance increases because it is often the last resort.

The list of all signature / RAW (recoverable+) formats supported by StrongRecovery is available in the technical specifications - section "RAW ANALYSIS ENGINE (SIGNATURE FILE RECOVERY)".

Summary

As you can see, file recovery does not have to be that difficult, it is important to follow a few rules mentioned earlier and data recovery using StrongRecovery is not a major problem. It can be successfully used for all types of media, such as: Hard drive, SD/microSD card, Pendrive. It is worth having the program already installed on the computer or available to run "immediately" (from a pendrive). The advantage of the program is that it does not need to be installed to work, the program files can be copied anywhere and run from there. There are also various installation versions of StrongRecovery (Setup, ZIP, Portable).