DeepRecoveryDesk – Deleted File Recovery for Windows
Accidentally deleted something? DeepRecoveryDesk gets it back. Recover files from your Recycle Bin, from NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT drives, or run a Deep scan that carves files back even after a quick format. Drive failing? Copy it to a disk image once and recover from the copy, and save your scan to come back to it later. Your drives are read strictly read-only, every recovered file is verified with a SHA-256 checksum, and nothing ever leaves your machine.
Download Version 0.3.0
Available on the Microsoft Store — no subscription, no ads.
Or view the listing at apps.microsoft.com.
Recover what you thought was gone
DeepRecoveryDesk reconstructs deleted files directly from your filesystem — reading the NTFS master file table (and the change journal), walking FAT32 and exFAT directory chains, and, in Deep scan, carving files back by their signatures even when no metadata survives. Results stream in live with a colour-coded confidence for each file, files that have since been overwritten are flagged as such, and you preview anything before you recover it. The source drive is never written to.
Changelog — what's new in each release
Full release history through 0.3.0 — the release that added disk images, saved scans, overwrite detection, real folder paths on FAT32 and exFAT, a Keep folders option, many more carvable file types, and scans and recoveries that read past bad sectors.
View the full changelogUser Guide — every step explained
A plain-English walkthrough of what it can recover, imaging a failing drive, choosing a source and scan mode, reading the confidence and status columns, saving a scan, recovering files safely — plus tips for the best results and how DeepRecoveryDesk keeps your data safe.
Read the User GuideFeatures
🗑️ Recycle Bin Recovery
Restore items emptied from the Recycle Bin — the data is fully intact, so success is highest here. No administrator rights required.
💽 NTFS Recovery
Recovers deleted files byte-for-byte from internal HDDs and SSDs by reading the master file table, and cross-references the change journal to surface names, times and folders of the most recently deleted files. Large, heavily fragmented files are recovered in full, and disks with 4K sectors are supported.
🧷 FAT32 & exFAT Recovery
Recovers from USB sticks and SD cards with each file’s full original folder path and long file name. On exFAT, fragmented files are reassembled by following the allocation chain; on larger FAT32 cards, a deleted file’s real starting location is rebuilt so the right data comes back.
🔬 Deep Scan — Free Space Only
Signature carving reads the raw drive to find files whose records are gone entirely — useful after a format, or when a Quick scan finds nothing. It reads the file system’s own free-space map and carves unallocated space only, so files still living on the drive are never listed as deleted, and the sweep covers far less ground. Signatures are structurally validated after their magic bytes match, which cuts the false positives that compressed and encrypted data used to produce. Photos, documents, archives, MP4, MOV, HEIC, WAV, AVI, WebP, BMP and older Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook files are recognised, and ZIP-based Office files, SQLite and 7z are carved to their exact length.
💿 Disk Images for Failing Drives
Create a disk image copies a drive sector by sector into an .img file on another drive — read a failing drive once, then scan and recover from the copy so the drive itself gets no more wear. Unreadable sectors are filled with zeroes and counted instead of stopping the copy. Open a disk image (.img, .dd, .raw) made by this app or another tool and it scans exactly like a drive, with no administrator rights needed; whole-disk images list each partition separately.
💾 Save & Reopen Scans
Save a scan to a .drscan file (Ctrl+S) and open it again later (Ctrl+O), even after closing the app. Every result keeps where its data lives and its recovery status, so you can preview and recover more without scanning again — with a reminder that the drive may have changed in the meantime.
⚠️ Overwrite Detection
Each deleted file’s storage is checked against the drive’s own record of what is in use. A file whose space has since been taken by another file is marked Overwritten or Partly overwritten and its confidence drops — so the results never promise data that is already gone.
🩹 Reads Past Bad Sectors
One unreadable sector no longer ends a scan or fails a recovery. Reads retry a failing area in smaller pieces and fill only the sectors that cannot be read, the scan reports how much of the drive was unreadable, and a recovery that hit bad sectors is clearly marked Partial. If one part of a scan stops, the others still run.
📊 Live Results, Filters & Confidence
Results stream in as the scan runs, each with a colour-coded confidence — green above 85%, amber 60–84%, red below. Filter to recoverable items only or to a minimum confidence, sort by any column including confidence, and search by name or path. A deep scan can return tens of thousands of rows; these narrow it to what is worth acting on. A per-row status column reports each item’s outcome, and a note marker explains any caveat — why something cannot be recovered, or why its confidence is low.
👁️ Preview Before You Recover
Click any result to preview it — a text snippet, an image thumbnail, or a hex dump — alongside its size and confidence, so you can confirm a file before recovering it.
🛡️ Read-Only & SHA-256 Verified
Source drives are opened strictly read-only and the app refuses to recover back onto the source drive. Every recovered file is verified with a SHA-256 checksum.
🔐 On-Demand Elevation & No Telemetry
The app runs un-elevated; raw drive scans prompt to relaunch as administrator only when needed (the Recycle Bin never does). No network calls, no telemetry — shown right in the status bar.
⏹️ Recovery You Can Watch and Stop
A recovery batch names the file it is on and tracks progress across the whole run, with a Stop recovery button — files already written are kept and complete, and anything not reached is marked skipped rather than silently ignored. Free space is checked before the first byte is written, so a large batch cannot fill the destination halfway through, and a failure summary groups problems by reason and names the files affected. Tick Keep folders to recover into the original folder layout, and an incomplete file is marked Partial rather than reported as verified.
📝 Export the Record
Export the results to CSV before you recover — a second scan of a live drive will not necessarily return the same thing, so the list is worth keeping. Export again afterwards for the recovery report: each output path and its SHA-256, which is the only way to verify a recovered file later.
Latest Release
Version 0.3.0 — October 14, 2026
The release for failing and well-used drives. Copy a failing drive to a disk image once and work from the copy, or open an existing image; save a scan and reopen it later to recover more without scanning again; and see which deleted files have already been overwritten. FAT32 and exFAT results now show their real folders, a new Keep folders option recovers into the original layout, and Deep scan finds MP4, MOV, HEIC, WAV, AVI, WebP, BMP and older Office files and carves ZIP, Office, SQLite and 7z files to their exact size. Fixes cover 4K-sector drives, larger FAT32 cards, large fragmented NTFS files, and bad sectors — incomplete recoveries are now clearly marked Partial.