Recuva Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

How to recover photos and other files you deleted by accident

Posted on July 10, 2021

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Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo, Microsoft Word document or some other file that you actually had no intention of deleting?

The fact is we have all done it at one time or another.

A fantastic free program called Recuva will scan your internal or external hard drive, USB thumb drive or the memory card from your camera or smart phone and give you the option to “undelete” any deleted files that it finds.

And guess what? It works like a charm! [Read more…]

Q&A: Is it true that you shouldn’t store important files on a USB flash drive?

Posted on June 26, 2021

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Question from Colette P.: My daughter emailed me a really cute picture of my grandson while I was at work.

I saved the picture to my computer’s hard drive and then copied it onto a USB flash drive.

I verified that the picture was on the USB drive and then I deleted it from the computer (we’re not allowed to keep personal files on our work computers).

One of my co-workers happened to see what I did and she asked me if I always store pictures like this on thumb drives. I told her yes I do.

In fact, I have over a dozen thumb drives containing a total of several thousand photos.

My co-worker shook her head and told me it’s a bad idea to keep files I don’t want to lose on a thumb drive because they can get lost or go bad. She said I need to transfer them to some other kind of storage.

What’s your opinion on this? [Read more…]

Q&A: I accidentally formatted my USB hard drive. Can I recover my pictures from it?

Posted on February 21, 2021

Question from Marie N.: I have an urgent question and I really hope you’ll have an answer for me.

I accidentally formatted the external USB hard drive that I use to store all of my scanned family photos with my Mac.

I meant to format the drive I use to store my Mac backups but I accidentally plugged in the wrong drive!

I hope you can help me recover my pics from it?

[Read more…]

Q&A: Can I recover photos from a memory card that I formatted by accident?

Posted on December 11, 2020

Question from Gabby H.: Rick, I made a really stupid mistake and I’m hoping you can help me out of a jam.

I’m not a pro photographer or anything, but I do love taking pictures, and I take a lot of them.

I use my trusty Canon Powershot camera with two SD cards (I swap them out when the first one becomes full).

What happened is I accidentally formatted the wrong card and wiped out a ton of pictures that I really want to keep. Is there any way to get those pictures back?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Is it possible to recover the files from a drive that was formatted by accident?

Posted on June 30, 2019

Question from Jane C.: I made a huge mistake Rick and I hope you can help me.

I accidentally clicked “Format” on the wrong drive and ended up formatting a USB flash drive with over 100 important photos on it!

Is there any way to “unformat” a drive that was formatted by mistake? Or maybe there’s some other way to retrieve the files?

I’ll be heartbroken if I’ve lost all those pictures!

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]