Free & open source · MIT · Windows 10/11

Get your files back.
Without making it worse.

Deleted documents, formatted SD cards, failing drives — BitBroom Rescue recovers them on one rule: the drive being recovered is opened read-only, always. The I/O layer physically has no write path. No ransom screens. No fake green flags.

Download Rescue View source

Portable — no installer, on purpose: installing could overwrite the very data you're trying to get back.

BitBroom Rescue

0bytes ever written to the source drive

0kdeleted files found in one real system-drive scan

0+carve formats, each validated before shown

MITlicensed — recovery is never paywalled

Every way back, in one tool

From “it's in the Recycle Bin” to “the drive is clicking” — Rescue covers the whole spectrum, and tells you honestly which one you're in.

NTFS undelete

Full MFT walk: deleted records, original folder paths reconstructed, resident and fragmented data followed through runlists. A real system drive scan enumerates 950k+ deleted files in seconds — read-only.

USB sticks & SD cards

FAT32 and exFAT engines recover deleted camera photos, dashcam clips and documents — long filenames stitched back together from what survives on disk, timestamps preserved.

Recycle Bin & previous versions

Parses the Bin's $I/$R records for original paths and deletion times, and surfaces Volume Shadow Copy snapshots — the two highest-confidence recoveries, checked first.

Carving for formatted media

When the file system is gone, signatures find the files: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, PDF, ZIP/DOCX, MP4/MOV (box-aware sizing for multi-gigabyte videos), MP3, RAR, SQLite and more — every hit validated before you see it.

Failing drive? Clone first

ddrescue-style two-pass imaging: grab everything readable fast, retry the bad spots gently, map what's lost — then recover from the image so the dying drive is stressed exactly once. Validated on a real drive that died mid-clone.

Honest confidence, honest health

Every file is scored High / Good / Fair / Poor with the reason. SMART and TRIM are checked up front — on a TRIMmed SSD it tells you deleted content is likely gone instead of selling you a “deep scan” of zeros.

Recovery tools can destroy what they're saving

Installing to, scanning from, or recovering onto the source drive overwrites deleted data. Rescue makes those mistakes structurally impossible.

Every recovery is…

Read-only at the type level — the engine's only I/O primitive has no write methods. Code that could write to your drive doesn't compile.
Destination-guarded — recovered files must land on a different drive. Same-volume destinations are refused before a single byte moves.
Audit-logged — every file written (or failed) is recorded in plain text next to the recovered files.
Collision-safe — existing files are never overwritten; duplicates get numbered suffixes, original timestamps are restored.
Validated — carved files must pass per-format coherence checks before they're even shown.
Clone-first for failing hardware — image once with a bad-sector map, then work from the image forever.

And it flat-out refuses…

Writing anything to the source drive — no scan caches, no indexes, no “helper” files.
Recovering onto the drive you're recovering from — enforced, not a warning you can click through.
“Quick unformat” and in-place undelete tricks that corrupt file systems when they go wrong.
Showing unvalidated garbage as “recoverable” to inflate results.
Claiming TRIMmed or overwritten data can come back — no consumer tool can do that, including this one.
Paywalls — there is no “activate to recover your files” screen. Ever.

Don't trust claims — it's MIT-licensed. Read the safety model or the code itself.

Just deleted something? Do this, in order

Every minute of normal use overwrites a little more of what you lost. The first rule of data recovery is simple: stop writing.

1
Stop using the affected drive. Don't install anything to it, don't download to it, don't “just check one thing” with the browser. Every write can land on your file's sectors.
2
Run Rescue from a different drive. It's one portable exe — put it on a USB stick or another partition. This is exactly why there's no installer.
3
Scan read-only, recover to a different drive. Rescue enforces this — the destination picker refuses the source volume.
4
Drive clicking or disappearing? Clone it first. Use Clone to image, let the bad-sector map record what's unreadable, then scan the image — the failing drive is touched exactly once.

Drive full of junk instead? BitBroom Cleaner reclaims the hidden gigabytes — with the same safety-first engineering. Meet Cleaner →