Five free recovery tools you can carry with you

By Jack Wallen September 3, 2012, 10:41 PM PDT

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Five free recovery tools you can carry with you

Introduction

ntNOTE: If you’d prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

ntPeople lose data, either by accidental deletion or thanks to problematic partition tables. No matter how the data gets lost, you’ll need a reliable tool to get the recovery job done. Here are five tools that can help you with partition recovery and file recovery. All these tools are free and can be placed on a flash drive for portability.

Portable Data Recovery

ntPortable Data Recovery is one of the Pendrive Apps and does a great job of recovering data from FAT, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partitions. It’s less than 500K and can recover some compressed and encrypted files.

Portable Data Recovery

ntPortable Data Recovery also includes a wipe tool that will allow you to permanently delete a file to protect deleted sensitive data. When you recover data, make sure you recover to a drive other than the one the data is recovered from.

TestDisk

ntTestDisk can fix a partition table, recover a deleted partition, rebuild or recover NTFS, FAT boot sectors, fix MFT, and undelete and/or copy files from NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3 file systems.

Recuva

Image: TechRepublic/Brandon Vigliarolo

Recuva

ntPiriform’s Recuva offers tons of features for a portable app of this nature. With it, you can undelete files, recover data from a damaged disk, recover deleted iPod music, and restore unsaved Word documents. Recuva also has an easy-to-use quick start wizard, can do deep scans, and can securely delete files.

Image: TechRepublic/Brandon Vigliarolo

Restoration

ntRestoration allows you to easily restore files that were deleted from the Recycle bin or directly deleted from Windows. It lets you quickly scan upon app startup, limit search results with search strings (or extension), and securely wipe files beyond simple recovery.

By Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic, The New Stack, and Linux New Media. He's covered a variety of topics for over twenty years and is an avid promoter of open source. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website jackwallen.

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