Developed by Piriform—the same team behind the widely popular CCleaner —Recuva is a dedicated data recovery utility for Windows. It works by scanning the areas of your hard drive or external media where deleted files were once stored. Because Windows does not immediately erase the data when a file is deleted (it simply marks the space as "available"), Recuva can often find and reconstruct the file before it is overwritten by new information. Key Features and Capabilities
| Scenario | Recuva Performance | Reason | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Recently deleted file (intact) | | MFT entry still present, clusters untouched. | | File on a heavily used drive | Poor | High probability of cluster overwrite. | | Formatted drive (quick format) | Good to Fair | Only filesystem tables cleared; data remains until overwritten. | | Formatted drive (full format or zero-fill) | None | Data clusters actively overwritten. | | SSD with TRIM enabled | Very Poor / None | TRIM command clears physical NAND blocks shortly after deletion. | piriform recuva