We save a lot of important data, all kinds of files and folders on our computer hard drive ( also known as Hard Disk Drive or simply HDD) on PC or Mac. However sometimes we may lost some or all of these data due to unexpected reasons, like photos, videos, music, office documents and other important data. For example you may have deleted files or folders by mistake, you may format the hard drive to fix some errors, your hard drive may crash due to sudden power failure or other unknown reasons, your hard drive may develop bad sectors during the long time use, your hard drive became a raw hard drive suddenly. You may lose or delete documents, files or their directories from your internal hard drive on PC or external hard drive under these scenarios. Some of these files or documents may be very important to you that you can’t afford to lose.
Is there any way to get the deleted or lost data back? In this guide, we will walk you through the easy-to-follow steps to recover lost files and folders from computer hard drive and external hard drive. You will be able to retrieve almost all kinds of files, including videos, pictures, audio files, document files, etc. Now download the recovery software, RecoverIt, onto your PC or Mac computers. Please make sure not to download or install the data recovery software onto the same hard drive or partition which you like to recover data from. For example, if you want to recover files from Drive D on your computer, you can download and install the data recovery to Drive C, Drive E or else.
Step 1. Connect portable hard drive to computer
If you like to recover lost data from external portable hard drive, plugin it to your computer through USB. If you want to recover files and folders from internal hard drives on your computer, you can simply skip this step.
Step 2. Choose a data recovery mode
When you run the data recovery tool on your PC or Mac, you will get the data recovery software wizard which will walk you through the data recovery process by asking you couple of questions.
In this hard drive recovery guide, we will choose the Standard Mode to proceed to the main interface as following.
You will find three different data recovery modes to choose from. They all have their own merits and demerits, advantages and disadvantages. Here are the main difference between them:
Lost File Recovery: Recover deleted and formatted files from a partition or removable media, such as files deleted by Shift+Delete or emptied from Recycle Bin. Lost File Recovery can restore formatted and deleted files with their original file names and paths.
Partition Recovery: Find out lost, deleted, resized or damaged partition, and then recover lost files and folders. Partition Recovery can retrieve corrupted or lost partitions, with all data intact.
Raw File Recovery: If previous scans cannot find your lost files, you can select Raw File Recovery. It will perform deep scan on your device and reclaim data even when the file system is corrupted.
So choose one of the above data recovery modes to continue to hard drive recovery. In this demo, we will select Raw File Recovery mode which is the most powerful solution to retrieve deleted, formatted or lost data from portable hard drive or computer hard drive.
Step 3. Choose internal or external hard drive
Now you have the chance to select a partition to recover files and folders from, could it be a computer hard drive on your computer or an external hard drive connected to your computer. There will be two scan options below the logical drives list. You can scan for all files and folders, it can find more lost data, but will take you more time. You can also choose to scan for deleted files only, this data recovery mode will scan for the deleted files only, thus can save you more time.
Step 4. Scan & Recover data
The scan of your hard drive will take some time, you can see a process bar indicator shows how long it will take. Once the hard drive recovery finishes the scanning of your external or internal hard drives, you will see a window as this:
From the left side of above window, you can see that all found files and data are categorized into different menus, like Archive documents, Audio & music, Documents, Graphic and images, Videos and movies and so on. More than 550 file formats are supported, Photos, videos, music, docs, emails, .zip, and many more. Now browse through the file types to recover files from computer hard drive or portable hard drive. You will have a chance to select where to save the files, make sure to choose a different hard drive to save the files to be recovered. Let say if you want to recover files from external hard drive, you can save the files to an internal hard drive on your computer.
The data recovery program can help you retrieve lost files from many other different devices, not only the computer hard drives or portable hard drives, but also recover data from SD card on digital Cameras and cellphones, and Flash, pen & USB drives, etc.