Nothing is as frustrating as losing valuable information from your hard drive that can happen due to human error or hardware failure. However, there may still be a chance to recover some of those files as many file deletions involve deleting the file index until that block of storage is overwritten. Just a simple “delete” command in Windows, for example, is not enough to make files irretrievable. To do that, you must safely clean the drive by writing multiple zeros or other data in multiple iterations or physically destroying the drive. The point is that if you have accidentally lost some of your valuable files, there is still a chance that you can restore them. Microsoft simply made it a little easier to do with the launch of the Windows File Recovery Tool.
Windows File Recovery is available as a free application from the Microsoft Store. However, it is not an application in the common sense of the term, as it is a command line tool. Although it uses a CLI interface, it is still very friendly to newbies. After starting the tool, you have options to point to the files you want to recover by name, paths or extensions. Microsoft says Windows File Recovery can recover data not only from the hard drive installed in your computer but also from external storage. This means that you can use the tool on USB drives, memory cards, external SSDs, and other storage devices, although Microsoft recommends using Signature Mode to retrieve files from external storage. There are also segment and default ways to retrieve files from NTFS formatted drives. As of now, the tool supports drives formatted in NTFS, FAT, exFAT and ReFS file systems and various file extensions such as PNG, PDF, MP3 and MP4, and many more.
You can find more information on how to use the tool, how it will work and what files you can retrieve from the Microsoft support page. You can download Windows File Recovery for free from the Microsoft store linked below. Just make sure you are running Windows 10 2004 or later to install the application.
Developer:
Microsoft Corporation
Via: Neowin
