Does Recuva work on portable disk drives?

[tombirner]

Hey y'all,

 

I lost a REALLY important file (a novel)... backed up in several places, but all of them crashed at once, it seems.

 

It somehow disappeared from my 3G portable disk drive. I think it's called a portable disk drive, thumb drive, USB, or something... sorry, I'm not too sharp with computers.

 

My question would Recuva be able to recover that? Or does it only work for actual computers??

[Augeas]

Yes, it will, or should do. Plug the thing in but don't do any additional work on that drive at all. Install Recuva on the C drive, open it and select the portable drive from the drop-down list, and run Recuva in normal mode. You can sort the results by size, date, name, path etc, or by entering a filename in the top r/h box. When and if you find anything recover it to the c drive, not the portable drive. If you don't have any joy then post here again.

 

It's hard to see how several copies of a file disappeared 'all at once', but an occasional backup to a cd or dvd is a good idea for really important files.

[kslice]

Recuva will most likely be able to find the file for you, depending on how much work you've done with the drive. The more work you've done, the less chance you have of getting the file back.

 

Just do as 'Augeas' said above. Install Recuva, plug in the portable drive (DO NOT touch any files on the portable drive, or place any on there), start up Recuva, select the portable drive letter (this can be found by going to 'My Computer'), and start scanning. I would recommend the deep scan option if it cannot find your file the first time.

 

Recuva will then show you which files it found on the portable drive. Look for the particular file you have lost, if you can see it in the list, choose to recover it and save it to your "C" Drive on your computer (make sure you are aware of where you are saving it).

 

Again, just make sure you do not do anything with the portable drive file-wise. The less you write to it, the better your chances are of recovering your file.