How to use Handy Recovery

How to use Handy Recovery

Step 1: Select Disk and Analyze It
The "Select disk or partition" dialog is displayed immediately after you start Handy Recovery. Initially this dialog contains the list of all drives available on your computer. You should select the one that contained the lost file (or files) and click the "Analyze" button.

If the needed drive is not present in the list because it was deleted, formatted or corrupted, you need to perform one additional step to find your lost partition on the physical disk. Please read the "Recovering files from deleted and corrupted partitions" section to know how to do this.

After you click the "Analyze" button Handy Recovery will start analyzing the content of selected disk. This procedure is required to find links to all deleted files and folders on that disk. It will take some time, so you have to wait while your file is found.

When analyzing, the program will display folder tree in the left view of the window. Newly found folders will be added to the tree. You can browse the content of any folder in the right view. You can stop the process by clicking the "Stop" button on the toolbar, if you already see your lost file in the list.

Next step is to find the lost file.

Step 2: Find Lost File on the Disk
If you select a folder in the left view, you will see its content in the right view. Now you can browse the content of your disk right like you do in the Windows Explorer. In addition to existing files and folders you will also see deleted ones. They are marked with a red cross over the icon: - for deleted files,  - for deleted folders. A small red cross at the bottom right corner of the folder icon means that the folder exists, but it contains deleted files or folders.

You can see the content of selected file in the preview pane below the file view.

You can click the filter button on the toolbar to apply file filter that will allow you to choose what files you want to see in the left window. You can filter by name, date, size and several other parameters. When you filter by name you can specify either a part of the file name or a wildcard. To disable filter simply click the filter button one more time.

Use the right view to select files and folders that you want to recover. You can also click the "Find file" button on the toolbar to search for a file by part of its name or by mask. Now the last step is to recover your files.

If you can not find your files in the list, possibly you still have a chance to recover them using extended analysis of the disk. Read more about that in the "Extended analysis to find more files" section.

If you are trying to recover files emptied from Recycle Bin, please read the "Recovering files emptied from Recycle Bin" section.

Step 3: Recover the File
After you selected files and folders that you want to recover, click the "Recover" button on the toolbar. The "Recover" dialog box will show up.

In this dialog you select a folder where you want to save the recovered files or folders. If you recover several files, it is strongly recommended to select a location on a different drive. This way you will make sure that first recovered file will not be saved over the data required to recover the next file.

You can also select the following options.

If this option is selected, the full branch of the folders tree containing the selected files and folders will be recovered to the selected folder.
 * Restore folder structure.

Check this option to recover only deleted files from selected folders. Existing (not deleted) files will not be copied to the output folder in this case.
 * Recover only deleted

Recover alternate data streams along with the main file data. Alternate data streams are used on NTFS file system to store additional information about files, such as user comments.
 * Recover alternate data streams.

Note: If you try to recover an encrypted file from an NTFS drive and save it to another drive that does not support EFS, the file will be saved in a special format with the ".$efs" extension. You will be able to extract the original content of the file using additional command line utility efs2ntfs.exe. You can find it in the Handy Recovery installation folder.