Formatted hard drive

Recuva
1

HELP!

Because of some PC issues on my wife’s PC that I could not easily/readily fix I hired an outside tech (did a good job on our laptops before) and he said the only way for him to restore it back to normal was to reformat the HD. He did so on Saturday, but incredibly failed to save any of her Outlook email files saying this morning that “he thought they were on her "my documents” folder" and that is only what he backed up!

She did not use her PC on Sunday. Then around midnight I heard the OMG shriek about her missing Outlook files.

Based on what I have read on your site and the independent excellent reviews, it appears your program can recover them, but I wanted to make sure?

Also, hoping your product will work, it appears that if I use the “portable” version via an external HD this avoids me having to use the laborious “slave” process?

2

Hi Robert, and welcome to the forum.

Recuva will work from a USB drive and will scan a formatted hard drive carrying a drive letter, but I would guess that the tech also reinstalled Windows after formatting the drive?

If so, the files you're trying to recover may have been overwritten with the new install, which will make them unrecoverable.

No harm in trying, and the portable version of Recuva is available here ...

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds

I've never used Outlook, but does it not create backups by default and save them somewhere in "My Documents"?

Some of the guys may use it and have a better answer.

3

Sadly Outlook does not do an automatic backup.

There are 3rd party programs that supply that function so check if your wife had one installed (I'm guessing not)

And the outlook.pst is only kept by default in the Documents folder with Office 2010 or above.