Windows only: If you've just deleted some important media files, DiskDigger is a straightforward file recovery tool geared specifically toward recovering multimedia and document files.
As we noted earlier this month in our feature on properly erasing your physical media, just because Windows says a file is gone doesn't mean it's lost forever. DiskDigger is a standalone application that scans the sectors of your physical media looking for complete or partial media files. Unlike other file recovery tools that look for any files, DiskDigger is focused on the ones that people most commonly accidentally delete and need to recover. In the options menu you can specify what kinds of files you want it to search for, including: images (JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and GIF), documents (DOC and PDF), and multimedia files (MPG, MP3, WMV, MOV and more). DiskDigger has active preview, allowing you to view files as they are discovered in the recovery process. The preview feature is especially helpful when scanning large drives, which can be a lengthy and intensive process. It took nearly two hours to deeply scan a 120GB SATA drive, although for smaller media recovery the process is markedly quicker; it took just 10 minutes to scan and recover files from a 2GB SD card.
One of the more interesting things about the deep scan of a primary drive is the number of images that aren't written over yet, despite their advanced age. In the screenshot above, you can see a photograph of Marilyn Monroe from when my wife and I redecorated a guest room with a 1950s/Marilyn Monroe theme over a year ago. Despite heavy drive activity, the photograph occupied a sector that remained untouched in all that time and was completely recoverable—yet more reinforcement to practice safe data handling and make sure to securely overwrite critical files. If you need to go beyond DiskDigger's media resurrection, make sure to check out our feature on recovering deleted files with free software for a huge assortment of tips and tools for getting your files back. DiskDigger is freeware, Windows only.
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