What it can and cant do

Recuva can:

• Scan through your hard drives, memory cards, and USB sticks to find files and folders you've deleted.
• Tell you in advance how likely it is that your file(s) can be recovered.
• Recover files that Windows can't (see Problems with Windows and file deletion)
• Securely delete a file you may have previously deleted.
• Recover emails you deleted 'permanently' from Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Windows Live Mail.
• Recover files from your iPod, iPod Nano, or iPod Shuffle (iPod Touch and iPhone not supported at this time). Recuva will even recover songs with Apple's FairPlay DRM.
• Recover Canon RAW (.CRW) format image files.
• Recover files from NTFS, FAT, and exFAT-formatted drives.
• Bring your files back!

Recuva cannot:

• Recover all files. Yes, as great as Recuva is it won't work all the time. Sometimes Windows has overwritten the area where the file used to be, or sometimes the file is too corrupted to recover.
• Recover files you've deleted securely. For example, if you've used our CCleaner software to delete files using the Secure option, they're gone for good.
• Securely delete certain very small files that are held in the Master File Table (MFT) and files of zero-byte length.
• Recuva is capable of recovering from NAS devices, however the drive needs to be connected directly to the machine via USB/IDE/SATA. Recuva is not capable of recovering data over a network.