Accidentally deleting files is easy to do. It's a sickening feeling when you realise what you've done. Fortunately, you might be able to get them back without spending any money.
Even though Windows may not be able to see a file you accidentally deleted - or perhaps became the victim to a disk failure - it’s usually possible that the data could still be there and able to be retrieved.
Many free programs attempt to recover deleted files, but you need to be careful before installing and using them (we'll explain why below). Here we're using Disk Digger, but most file recovery utilities work the same way, and we'll recommend some alternatives if this doesn't work for you.
• Download
Disk Digger, extract the contents of the Zip folder and run the .exe file
• Select the disk containing your deleted files and click Next. Allow the tool to scan for missing files
• Check the list and preview images of returned files for your deleted document or media
• Select your file and click Recover selected files
• Choose a save location, which must be different to the original location
For more in-depth instructions jump to our walkthrough on how to undelete files.
Look in the Recycle Bin for deleted files
The first thing you should do is check the Windows' Recycle Bin if you've just deleted something you didn't mean to. When you select a file and press the Delete key (or right-click and choose the Delete option from the menu), Windows makes no attempt to delete it at all.
Instead, it moves it to a special folder called the Recycle Bin, which has its own icon on the desktop. Restoring a file from the Recycle Bin is a simple matter of double-clicking on the desktop icon to display the contents and then right-clicking on the file and selecting Restore from the menu.
If the Recycle bin icon is not there, search in the Start menu for 'Show or Hide' and you should see a shortcut to the settings where you can tick the box next to the Recycle Bin and make it appear.
Don't rely on the Recycle Bin as a safety net, though: it has a size limit and once you exceed that, older files will be deleted permanently and automatically. The default size is more than adequate for most people so there’s a very good chance that any files you want to restore will still be present in the Recycle Bin. To check the capacity or alter it, right click on the Recycle Bin and choose Properties.
There are occasions when you've emptied the Recycle Bin too hastily, or perhaps you're overly fond of the Shift-Delete shortcut which bypasses the Recycle Bin and actually deletes the data. (We're still tying to wean ourselves off this unhelpful habit.)
if your files were on an SD card or USB flash drive there is no Recycle Bin function, so delete really is delete in this case.
But before resorting to file recovery software, it is still worth checking other avenues. Have you shared the file or document via email? Have you saved or synchronised it with a cloud storage service? Or have you been sensible and made a backup of the files on another hard drive?
No? Well fear not, because t
here are plenty of programs including Disk Digger
and PC Inspector File Recovery which might be able to bring them back.
Undelete a file using recovery software
Undelete software works by looking on the disk to see if the data is still there, even after a 'permanent' deletion.
All Windows really does when it deletes a file (permanently) is scrubs out the information about where it was stored on the disk. It's a bit like crossing out the address on an envelope: the contents are still in it, but a postman wouldn't know where to deliver it.
However, it pays to understand the limitations of this method. First of all, as well as removing the 'pointer' to the file, Windows also marks the areas of the disk occupied by the file as available for re-use and will eventually overwrite them with new files. Once that’s happened, your data is gone for good.
So, the sooner you realise you’ve accidentally deleted a file, the better your chances of recovering it. When you notice your loss, don’t save anything to the disk and don't even download or install a file recovery utility if the file was on your PC or laptop's hard drive as it might overwrite the very files you're trying to recover.
Some recovery software can run directly from a USB flash drive but you must download it using a different computer. Even browsing the internet to find an undelete utility causes files to be written to your disk so use a different PC to download the utility.
Undelete utilities only work reliably with sequential files. If your disk is reasonably full, Windows often has to split the file across spare blocks around the disk and in this case, a deleted file is very difficult to recover.
Plus, different types of drive use different file systems and any undelete utility will work only with particular types of file system. Hard disks in Windows PCs use the NTFS file system but USB flash drives and memory cards usually use some variant of FAT (FAT16, FAT32 or exFAT) and you should select software with the necessary support for all your media.
