Support
Start here. Most questions are answered below — if not, email us and we'll answer personally.
Getting started
The best order to do things
- Stop using the drive. Every write reduces what can be recovered.
- Install on a different disk — never on the one you're rescuing.
- Check the health. Read SMART data first. If the drive is failing, image it before scanning.
- Scan. Quick scan first; advanced scan if the volume is damaged or nothing was found.
- Preview. Confirm the files are intact before committing.
- Recover to a different drive. The program will insist on this, and it's right to.
Rules that actually matter
- Never save recovered files back onto the source disk
- Never run chkdsk or "repair" tools on a disk whose data you want back
- Never let Windows format a volume it offers to fix
- Never keep a failing drive powered on longer than necessary
- Do prefer an internal SATA connection over USB when the drive allows it
A disconnect between "the drive is broken" and "my files are gone" is the single most common way people lose data they could have saved. Repair utilities and reinitialising a disk both write to it.
Licence & activation
After purchase you receive an email with your licence details. Open the program, choose Register from the menu and enter them. Activation can be completed without an internet connection if the machine you're working on has none.
Check your spam folder first — it's usually there. If it's still missing, email us with the address you used at checkout and the approximate time, and we'll resend it manually.
Deactivate the licence on the old machine from the registration dialog, then activate on the new one. There is no charge and no limit on how often you do this. If the old machine is gone or won't boot, contact us and we'll release it for you.
Just enter your licence details again. Reinstalling the operating system does not consume a new activation — you're entitled to keep using the licence you paid for.
That normally means it's still active on another machine — often an old PC you've since replaced. Deactivate it there, or contact us and we'll clear it. This is an anti-sharing check, not an accusation.
Troubleshooting
Make sure the program is running as administrator — raw device access requires it, and without elevation some drives simply don't appear. Also try a different USB port or connection; some cheap enclosures and adapters do not pass the drive through properly.
An advanced scan reads every sector, so a large drive takes time. USB enclosures are typically several times slower than a direct SATA connection. If the drive is unwell, slow reads may also be a symptom of the hardware failing rather than the software.
Run the advanced scan rather than the quick scan. If that also finds nothing, the most likely explanations are that the data has been overwritten, or that the drive is a TRIM-enabled SSD whose deleted blocks have already been erased in the background.
For files recovered by content carving, this usually means the file was fragmented and its later fragments have been overwritten, so the beginning survives but the rest doesn't. Try recovering from an image, and check whether a second pass with the advanced scan finds a more complete copy.
Recovery tools access raw disk devices, which heuristics sometimes treat with suspicion. Always download from this site and verify the checksum. If a scanner still objects, report it to us so we can submit a false-positive request.
Still stuck?
Email us. Include your Windows version, what the drive is doing, and what you've tried so far.