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The ultimate free
data recovery tool
DMDE: rescue all kinds of lost and deleted data from your drives
ometimes, despite your
best efforts, data loss
occurs. It may be as
simple as accidentally
deleting a file or as
major as a partition or
entire drive disappearing. Once upon a
time, recovery involved expensive fees
(and if your drive is physically damaged,
you may still need to employ the
services of specialists like Ontrack
– www.ontrack.com/uk/ – to see if
anything’s recoverable). Nowadays,
though, armed with the right tools you
can often get that data back at no cost.
One of the most powerful free tools is
DMDE, capable of all kinds of recovery
- even from drives rescued from broken
enclosures that have been formatted in
such a way as to make them impossible
to access when removed from their
original housing. Download the GUI for
Windows version from https://dmde.
com/download.html – it’s a portable
tool (see box), so download it to any
drive except the one containing your
lost data, then extract it to the same
drive. Open the folder and double-click
dmde.exe to get started (if a
SmartScreen warning pops up, click
More Info > Run anyway).
Recover your data
Step one of the process involves
selecting the drive on which your
missing data resides – a handy hint
steersyoutowardseitherlogical(for
simple data deletion) or physical (for
missing drives). If you choose the latter,
select your drive and click OK to have it
scanned. If you’re lucky, the missing
partition will show up; if not, click Full
Scan and follow the prompts to see if
DMDE can recreate it.
To recover data from a detected drive,
click ‘Open Volume’ to browse its
contents. If the entire partition was
missing, you can now start recovering
data from the drive by selecting the
folder in the left-hand panel and
pressing [Ctrl] + [U] to save the files to
anotherdrive(theDMDEdirectorybydefault). Note, the free version limits you
to recovering up to 4,000 files at a time;
purchase a licence (either $16 for a
single-year licence, or $38 for lifetime)
to remove this restriction.ALSO CONSIDER: If you’re put off by
DMDE’s slightly daunting user interface,
try Recuva (download the portable
version from http://www.ccleaner.com/recuva/
features/portable-version) instead. It’s a
more user-friendly affair, but not as
powerful as DMDE. Our advice: try this
first, then switch to DMDE if Recuva isn’t
abletohelp.DMDE can recover deleted and lost data from missing partitions as well as regular volumes.Windows 10
Free apps you can’t live without
April 2020 | |^17
Build a portable toolkit
Many of the apps we’ve covered in this feature are available
as portable applications, allowing you to store them on a
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them in the knowledge all your preferences are stored in
one convenient location easy to back up and restore after a
Windows reinstall. They include Firefox, FastStone Photo
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The centrepiece of any portable toolkit has to be
PortableApps (www.portableapps.com), which gives you a
handy launcher tool for managing and running portable
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PortableApps catalogue. But you can also add portable apps
manually too (look for a portable download on the
program’s own website – simply copy the program folder
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App Icons to bring them into view under the ‘Other’
category. Then right-click the icon and choose Category to
move them to a more suitable category.After manually adding a portable app
to the PortableApps launcher, assign it
to the correct category.