Using ByteRescue

Using ByteRescue

A tour of the main window, plus a step-by-step walkthrough for a first recovery attempt.

The main window

The toolbar across the top has five buttons:

Button	What it does
Refresh Drives	Re-scans Storage Devices in the background (no UI freeze — see How It Works)
Open Folder	Analyzes a folder you pick
Analyze File	Analyzes a single file you pick, including its SHA-256 hash
Hex Viewer	Opens the Hex Viewer on the current selection
Recovery Center	Opens the Recovery Center window

Below the toolbar are two tabs:

• Analysis — a two-pane view: Storage Devices on the left (a live list of detected drives — model, capacity, interface, status), and an Analysis panel on the right showing details for whatever you've selected or analyzed. The Analysis panel is read-only (selectable/copyable, not editable) — ByteRescue never writes to what you're inspecting.
• What am I looking at? — an in-app plain-English glossary covering physical drives, capacity, interfaces, status, analysis results, SHA-256, the hex viewer, file carving/recovery, SSD/TRIM limitations, and safe recovery practices. See also Glossary for the wiki version.

A first recovery, step by step

1. Stop using the affected drive. Any further writes risk overwriting the data you want back — see Best Practices.
2. Launch ByteRescue via ByteRescue.bat so it's elevated (see Installation) — physical drive access needs Administrator privileges.
3. Click Recovery Center.
4. Pick a Recovery Mode (see Recovery Center for what each one actually does):
   • Know the format you lost? Start with Recover by Signature.
   • Lost a document/code/log file? Try Recover Text Files.
   • Scanning a whole physical drive? Use Deep / Raw Scan.
   • Know the volume is FAT12/16/32? Try Recover by File System first — it can recover the original filename, which the other three modes can't.
5. Pick a Source: a file/disk-image, or a physical drive (only available when elevated).
6. Pick a Destination folder on a different physical drive than the source. ByteRescue warns you if you pick somewhere risky.
7. Click START RECOVERY SCAN. Watch live progress (offset, scanned/total, speed, ETA, candidates found/valid/rejected); use Pause/Resume/Stop as needed.
8. When it's done (or you've seen enough), use Preview or View in Hex Viewer on a result before trusting it — check its Validation column (Passed/Partial/Failed/Unknown) and whether its end offset was Verified or Unverified (see Recovery Signatures).
9. Recover Selected to write chosen results to your destination folder.
10. Export Report to save a JSON summary of the scan, and Open Log if anything looked wrong — see Logging and Debugging.

Related pages

Recovery Center · Hex Viewer · Best Practices · Troubleshooting