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Files — browse & recover data

The Files window is RECON's headline feature: browse any drive and copy data off to a backup drive, with no Windows password. Because RECON boots its own Windows, it reads the machine's drives directly — the user's login password is irrelevant.

The one exception is encryption: a BitLocker-locked drive is shown but not read until you unlock it with the recovery key. RECON never bypasses that — see the Safety model.

Browsing

  • A drive rail lists every drive with its label, type, and free / total space.
  • Open a drive and navigate with the path bar and Up button; folders are listed first, then files, with sizes and dates.
  • A locked (BitLocker) drive is listed but reads as locked, with a prompt to unlock it with the recovery key rather than any attempt to read it.

Recovering data to a backup drive

The core workflow — pull a customer's files off onto your own backup drive:

  1. Select files and folders with the per-row checkboxes (or select all).
  2. A selection bar appears — choose Copy to backup….
  3. Pick a destination drive. The picker excludes the source drive, the RECON boot volume, and read-only (CD/DVD) drives, so you can only copy outward.

  4. RECON copies everything into a timestamped folder:

    <destination>\RECON Recovery\<timestamp> <sourceDrive>\

  5. A progress view runs the copy on a background thread, then a result screen summarizes it.

Nothing on the source is changed. The copy only reads the source and writes to the destination — it never moves or deletes the originals.

Which copier runs

The copy uses Windows' built-in file copy (robocopy under the hood when a dedicated copier isn't staged), so it works out of the box. You can optionally stage FastCopy or TeraCopy for checksum-verified copies — see Bundled tools.