Reflota is a free, open-source Windows tool for recovering files from NTFS, FAT12/16/32 and exFAT disks, USB drives, memory cards and disk images. It reads disks in read-only mode and can rebuild folder trees from filesystem metadata, show deleted files and copy selected items to a different drive. Users can search by filename, including deleted entries, or scan disk contents for recognizable file formats when names and folders are gone. Content scanning supports many common photos, camera RAW files, videos, audio files, documents, archives and SQLite databases; recovered files found this way receive generated names. It can also search for lost partitions and continue reading when sectors are damaged, logging partial files.
A key feature is phased disk imaging for failing drives: Reflota first copies readable areas quickly, then revisits damaged regions with increasingly focused reads. It records unreadable sectors, saves progress in a map file and can resume after interruption, letting users recover from the image rather than repeatedly stressing the original. The project is in beta, and several newer features have only been tested on disk images, not real hardware. Recovery has important limits: deleted FAT/exFAT files may be reconstructed incorrectly if fragmented; content scans generally cannot restore original names or fragmented files, though an optional method attempts to rebuild baseline JPEGs. It does not support filesystems such as ext4 or APFS, decrypt BitLocker, repair physical failures, or recover every file type. The guidance is to stop using a damaged disk and save recovered data elsewhere.
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