If you are reading this article, you probably deleted something important on your computer that you need to restore as soon as possible! Hopefully, the disappeared files or folders were recently deleted, because the more data is written to the disk, the more likely it is that the hard disk partition containing the data will be overwritten with new data, thereby significantly reducing your chances of recovery.
Before we move on to the different ways to recover deleted files, first make sure you check a couple of things:
1. Always check the Trash to make sure your files are not there. If so, just right click to restore them.
2. Make sure you close all other programs, even those running on the taskbar.
3. Do not create new files, move data, copy data, etc.
In this article, we will focus on recovering data from your computer’s hard drive. If you are trying to recover photos from SD card or USB drive, see the link to my other article. As with the simplest data recovery, we always start with data recovery software. This is usually the cheapest option to start with.
If free and paid software can’t get your data back, you’ll have to turn to more specialized data recovery companies that charge between $ 500 and $ 1,500 to recover data directly from hard drives. Here we will only talk about software. I will share the pair I have used and tested.
Recova
Recuva is probably one of the more popular data recovery options out there and I have achieved very good results myself with this program. The free version allows you to recover data without paying. Let’s see how we will use the program. Once you install and run it, the wizard interface will launch. I would recommend using a wizard. Click “Next” and you will first be asked what type of files you are trying to recover.
If you know exactly what you are trying to recover, feel free to choose this type, otherwise just select All files. You will then be asked where you want to search for the deleted files.
If you know the location of the deleted files, you can select “In a specific location” and click “Next”. However, if nothing was found in this location, this does not mean that the files still cannot be recovered. In my test, I deleted the folder from My Documents and then emptied the Trash, but chose the My Documents location to search. Nothing came of it, and I decided to try searching the entire disc. Of course, the files were found, but in a hidden folder in the recycle bin on disk. Therefore, you should always select “I’m not sure” and allow the entire disk to be searched even if other locations have failed.
Finally, you can check if you want to deep scan or not. It will take longer, but you have a better chance of recovering more data. Go ahead and hit Search and Recuva will start scanning your hard drive.
By default, the program splits files into categories such as Documents, Music, Videos, etc., and you can change this in the dropdown list. You can also change the scan location and if you click on any of the files, you can get a preview. Check the top box to select all files and then click “Recover”. You will need to choose a location for the files, which should be on a different drive besides the drive from which the data is being recovered. If you’re recovering data from your C drive and you don’t have another drive, use a USB stick. Do not restore the same disk! The program will even give you a warning about it.
In my test, Recuva was able to recover 122 MB from 128 MB of images, documents and music files without deep scanning, so this is definitely a good program to try in the first place as it is also free.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery
The next tool, MiniTool Power Data Recovery, is actually better than Recuva in terms of data recovery and features, but the free version only allows you to recover up to 1GB of data. After that, you need to purchase a personal license, which costs $ 69. It’s a bit expensive, but it all depends on the importance of the data you need to recover. If these are precious family photos, $ 69 is no big deal.
After installing it, you need to choose what type of recovery you want to perform. For deleted files, select “Recover Recovery”. As you can see, you can also use the program to recover from digital media, recover data from CD / DVD, etc.
Select the drive you want to recover data from and click the “Recover” button.
The scanning process is actually pretty quick and you will get a tree view of the various files and folders that have been recovered. You want to go to the folder where your files were saved and see if that path exists.
Then select the files using the checkboxes and click “Save Files”. Again, save the files to a different drive to avoid the risk of overwriting deleted data during recovery.
Test Disk
The last program to try is TestDisk, which is free. The program also comes bundled with PhotoRec, the program I talked about in another post about recovering photos from SD cards. TestDisk is designed to recover files on hard drives.
When you download the zip file, unzip it and then run the testdisk_win application which is located in the directory. You will see a command prompt appears and this is how the program works! It’s a little scary, but actually very easy to use.
First, it will ask if you want to create a log file, add it, or not use it at all. I would suggest just leaving it selected in Create and hitting Enter. You will now be asked which drive you want to scan.
Use the arrow keys to select the drive, and then make sure Proceed is selected before pressing Enter. You will then be asked what type of disk you are using.
If your computer is running Windows with NTFS or FAT partitions, leave it at Intel. They also have options for formatted Mac drives, Sun Solaris systems, and even an XBox partition.
Finally, select “Advanced” to go to the advanced file tools. Make sure you use the right arrow key to navigate to “Undo Delete” and then press Enter.
After a while, you will receive a list of all found files. You can select individual files with: or press A to select all files. When selected, the text turns green. Then press C to copy the files.
Note that if you have multiple files selected, you need to hit uppercase C, not lowercase c. I didn’t realize it at first, I only got one file and couldn’t figure out why! Finally, it will ask you for the destination, so be sure to select the location on the drive with the deleted files.
If you’ve managed to get through all of this, you should see a red line at the top showing how many files have been copied. We hope that after completion you will have some or all of your data recovered.
So, these are three really good programs that you can use to recover files deleted on your computer. The main thing to understand is the time, do not use the computer at all, do not install the recovery program on the same drive as the deleted files, and do not restore files to the same drive. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!
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