Last weekend, my wife Lynn and I spent a delightful day with our son and two grandchildren. Countless beautiful memories were recorded digitally. Then we encountered a digital disaster.
After Lynn thought she had downloaded all her pictures to her computer, and after she had DELETED ALL files from her camera’s memory card, we discovered that she had lost some of the pictures because her computer’s hard drive had been too full to hold them all (literally less than 1 megabyte of usable space). I did everything I knew how to do to try and find the pictures on the card and on the computer, all to no avail. We resigned ourselves to the loss of pictures–until yesterday morning when I discovered the free resource I’m writing about here. To make a long story short, we now have our photos back.
Recuva is a free Windows utility that can be downloaded and used to recover deleted files. Here’s how the developers describe the software:
Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!
At less than 1 megabyte, Recuva is a small program. It was quick and easy to install, and then a snap to use. When you run the program, you just select the drive or device that you wish to scan for deleted files, and it proceeds to show all the files that it finds. As long as you can identify the name of the file you are looking for, it can be restored instantly. Recuva’s website offers a set of step-by-step screenshots that demonstrate how to use the program. The user interface, however, is intuitive and very easy to use.
You never know when Recuva could be a life-saver, so I think you would be wise to add it to your toolkit–before you need it.
Click here if you’d like to see some photos of our family time last weekend. To see an Animoto video I made with these pictures, click here. Finally, you can check out a PhotoShow here. The PhotoShow may take a while to load, but from my biased perspective it is well worth the wait.
