How to recover deleted files?

How files are deleted ?

When a file is deleted from your computer it is not really deleted. It is simply removed from the directory of files in the folder. Even though you can no longer see the file in the folder, its contents still exist 100% intact at this point.

If you're using Windows and you deleted the file using Windows Explorer, the file will have been moved to the Recycle Bin. If you're a Mac user, it's moved to the Trash. If you use Linux KDE, it's the Wastebin. Whatever the bucket shaped object is called, as long as a file remains there it can easily be restored in its entirety, with no problem at all. So the first thing to do when you want to recover a deleted file is look in the Recycle Bin / Trash / Wastebin.

If you emptied the bin, used Shift Delete to get rid of the file, deleted it from within an application or used some other method of removing it that bypassed the bin, then it is still almost certainly recoverable. When you empty the Recycle Bin or delete a file using another method, the file is still not really deleted. The file no longer exists as far as the operating system is concerned and the space it occupied becomes available for re-use by other files. But the disk space does not get re-used straight away, so the data contained in the deleted file will stay on your hard drive for some time to come.

Chances of recovery

Because the operating system doesn't immediately re-use space from deleted files, a file can be recovered or undeleted right after it has gone, and for a considerable time afterwards. But the chances of a perfect undelete decrease the longer you leave it, because eventually some or all of that space will be re-used.

The chances of recovery also depend on how full your computer's hard drive is. Windows tries to avoid re-using disk space that has recently been freed, to give deleted file recovery software a better chance of working. But the fuller a drive is, the sooner the free space is going to be used by other files.

If you have defragmented the hard drive since the file was deleted, then this will severely harm the chances of a successful recovery. Current files will have been moved into the free space left by deleted files in order to reduce fragmentation, making it much less likely that undelete software will be able to find anything useful.

Recovering deleted files

Tools that can help you undelete files are not provided as standard in any operating system. So you will need to use undelete software from a third party.

Undelete software understands the internals of the system used to store files on a disk (the file system) and uses this knowledge to locate the disk space that was occupied by a deleted file. Because another file may have used some or all of this disk space, there is no guarantee that a deleted file can be recovered. But because the space isn't re-used straight away, there is a very good chance that you will succeed. In fact, users of our recommended Windows undelete software Uneraser have often been amazed to find that it recovers files that were deleted months or even years ago. The best undelete programs give you an indication of the chances of recovering a file intact, and even provide file viewers so you can check the contents before recovery.

Undelete software for Windows

If you're running Microsoft Windows then Uneraser is the best undelete software you can buy. It is developed by a company that specializes solely in data recovery products. Uneraser uses the deepest search methods and the most sophisticated recovery algorithms to give you the best possible chance of recovering your files. It also has powerful tools to help you find the files you want from among the thousands on the average hard disk.

Uneraser has the widest range of built-in viewers to let you examine the files it finds before recovery. You can try it with no risk. A free trial version lets you see for yourself whether it can recover the files you lost. If a file looks perfect in the viewer then recovery is 100% guaranteed.

See a tutorial showing how to recover deleted files using Uneraser

Download a free trial of Uneraser

See more information about Uneraser

Another reliable and effective Windows undelete software is Data Recovery Wizard. It is a full data recovery product that can even restore files from lost or corrupted partitions. Just like Uneraser you can try before you buy.

See a tutorial showing how to recover deleted files using Data Recovery Wizard

Download a free trial of Data Recovery Wizard

See more information about Data Recovery Wizard

Undelete software for Mac OS

For Apple Mac users we recommend Data Rescue II. This is a powerful, professional data recovery software that can be relied upon to restore your deleted files if at all possible.

Download a free trial of Data Rescue II

See more information about Data Rescue II

An alternative, easy to use uneraser for Mac users is File Recovery for Mac. This will recover your files in no time.

See a tutorial showing how to recover deleted files using File Recovery for Mac

Download a free trial of File Recovery for Mac

See more information about File Recovery for Mac

If you are able to connect your Mac disk drive to a Windows PC then you could also use the Windows based Uneraser to perform data recovery on it. The new Uneraser 4.0 can recover deleted files from Mac HPFS+ and Linux ext2/ext3 file systems, as well as FAT and NTFS.

Saving the recovered data

One of the cardinal rules of data recovery is that you must never write to the disk that contains the files you want to recover. This is because anything that gets written to the drive could potentially be written to the space that was holding the data you hope to recover. You should save the files that have been recovered to a different drive to the one they were recovered from. This could be an external drive or a network share, even a USB memory stick.

All of the undelete software products that Tech-Pro.net recommend will prompt you to save recovered data to a different location, but Uneraser has the greatest number of options. It has the ability to burn files direct to writeable CD or DVD without creating any temporary files on the hard drive. You can even save the files recovered to an FTP server.