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Have you lost your data and want to Recover lost data from your hard drives or removable drives such as pen drives, SD cards etc. If so, you have landed on the right page now. In this post we are writing in-detail about different ways to recover lost data from different storage devices.

Causes of Data Loss

There may be number of reasons for losing data from different storage drives such as internal or external hard drives, USB drives, SD cards or other removable drives. Following are the causes of data loss that may occur on your storage drives.

• When your devices or computers had infected by the viruses.
• Due to human errors such as accidentally deleting files or formatting the drives, errors on copy and paste etc.
• Due to error on software system such as software crashes, error on saving files etc.
• When the failure on your storage drives such as disk damage, drive failure, generating bad sectors etc.

Although there always a risk of data loss on your storage drives, you may recover them using some techniques described below in this article. The techniques that can be used for recovering lost data may be using Software or without using software.

Read Also: What Not to Do While Retrieving the Deleted Photos

How to Recover Lost Data Without Using Software

Use the following methods to recover lost data without using any software, if your files, folders or applications deleted from your secondary or removable storage drives.

1. Recovering with restoring previous version of windows

There is a feature of windows, which allows you to restore previous versions of windows. If you have accidentally deleted some files or folders of your hard drive you can return back them using the windows restore service. You can create the restore point manually or windows will create it automatically if system protection was turned on. Use the following steps to enable system protection if it was disabled by default.

1. Go to control panel, select icons view>click on “System” or select category view>click on “System & Security” and then “System”.
2. Now, click on the “System Protection” option.
3. Available drives and protection status will be shown in a new window.
4. Select the drive which you want to enable protection and click on configure button.
5. Select “Turn on system protection” and adjust the “Disk space usage” bar to adjust the maximum disk usage.
6. Now, click on “Apply” and then “Ok”. Repeat the steps 4 and 5 to enable system protection for other drives.

Now you can create the restore point for the drives that have system protection turned on,that can be used for restoring lost data later.

After enabling system protection, select the drive for which you want to create restore point and click on create button. Provide the name of the restore point and click on create button as shown on the screenshot below.

If you have lost multiple files, folders or programs and want to recover all of them at a time, you can use system restore service available on system protection. For this, click on system restore button. Select the recently created system restore point, select the drive and click on Finish button to complete system restore.

If you want to recover any deleted files or folders under any folders or drives, right click on the folder or drive and select “Restore previous versions”. You can restore or open for preview clicking on the respective buttons if previous versions are available as given on the screenshot below.

2. Recovering lost data using command prompt

If you have lost data from hard disk drive, SD cards or pen drives due to virus infection or corrupted partitions, you can recover it using command prompt on windows. Use the following steps if you have lost data due to corrupted partitions.

1. Go to windows search box and search for “cmd” or “command”
2. Right click on command prompt application and click on run as administrator.
3. Now, write the command “chkdsk drive letter /r /f” on command prompt and then press enter. For example, if you want to recover drive G:, type chkdsk G: /r /f and press enter.
4. Wait and see if the drive was recovered.

Use the following steps if you have lost data due to virus infection on your drive.

1. Run the command prompt as administrator.
2. Type the driver letter (G:) of the drive which you want to recover in the command window and press enter.
3. Now, type the command “attrib -h -r -s /s /d *.* ” and then press enter key.
4. Wait to complete the process and observe whether the files are recovered.

If you have tried all the methods described above and unable to recover the lost data, you may have to use any of the best data Recovery Software.

How to Recover Lost Data Using Data Recovery Software

There are number of data recovery software available which allows you to recover lost data from different storage devices whether you have lost the data with any of the reasons. You may require to purchase user licences in order to use the software. You may also find some of data recovery software on trial version and also on free version.

Most of the data recovery software can recover formatted secondary storage or removable drives, permanent data deletion, lost partition, virus attack, RAW partition etc. All of the data recovery software uses the same types of steps to recover lost data, which are as follows.

• Select the drive and scanning the lost files.
• Preview and select recovered data.
• Recover the lost data to get the files back.

Following are the list of widely used data recovery software that can be used for recovering almost all the types of data loss.

1. Setller Data Recovery: It was the most popular all in one data recovery software. It can recover all types storage devices such as internal or external hard drive, pen drives, SD cards etc.
2. EaseUS Data Recovery: It was another most powerful data recovery software. It can easily recover formatted SD card, formatted hard drive, formatted partition, permanently deleted files etc.
3. Recuva Data Recovery: It was another best data recovery software tool. It can recover almost all the types of files such as videos, emails, pictures, documents etc.

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