How To: Recover deleted files

If you have lost important files from your hard drive, and you are sure that they have been deleted, then there is no need to panic. It's easier to recover deleted files than it is to restore them if they have been overwritten or corrupted, or if the drive has been repartitioned or reformatted.

Pick the right data recovery tool for the job

The advice given in this article applies only if your files really were deleted. If they have been overwritten or corrupted, if the disk they were stored on has been formatted, or if you don't know how they were lost, you have a more general data recovery problem, and you should read our article How To: Data Recovery. It also applies only to files lost from hard drives and floppy disks. If you have lost files from CD or DVD, see How To: CD Data Recovery.

Recycle Bin

The reason that recovering deleted files is different from other data recovery tasks is that it is easier. When a file is deleted from your computer, it is not really deleted. It is simply removed from the list of files in the folder.

If you're using Windows, and deleted the file using Windows Explorer, the file will normally have been moved to the Recycle Bin. While it is in the Recycle Bin, the file 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.

If the file you need isn't in the Recycle Bin - if you emptied the bin, deleted the file using Shift Delete, deleted the file from within an application or used some other method that bypassed the Recycle Bin - then don't despair. It may still be recoverable. When you empty the Recycle Bin or delete a file using another method, the file is still not really deleted. The file name is removed from the list of files in the folder or the Recycle Bin, and the space occupied by the file is made available to Windows for reuse. But Windows does not reuse the space straight away, so the data contained in the file will remain intact for some time to come, allowing the possibility of recovery.

Chances of recovery

A file can be recovered or undeleted in its entirety right after it has been deleted, and for a fair while afterwards. But the chances of recovering the file intact decrease the longer you leave it. Because the longer you leave it, the more likely it is that the computer will reuse all or part of the file's disk space for something else.

If you have defragmented the hard drive since the file was deleted, then unfortunately you have dealt a severe blow you your chances of a successful recovery. All the pointers to the location of the deleted data will have been lost, so it is much less likely that undelete software tools will find anything useful. You may have more luck using specialist products that can recover specific file types such as photo recovery software or Microsoft Word recovery software.

Recover deleted files

Tools that can help you undelete files that were deleted but are not in the Recycle Bin are not provided as standard in Windows. You will need to buy third party undelete software to do this. This software understands the internals of the system used to store files on a disk, and can locate clues to the whereabouts of the disk space a lost file occupied. This unerase software can also read the unallocated disk space, the space your deleted files formerly occupied and which is available for reuse. This space can't normally be read by programs.

It's advisable to have a second hard disk available, such as a removable drive, USB Flash drive or a network drive, if you don't already have more than one drive in your computer. You can install the recovery software on this drive, and then save the files that you recover to it, without overwriting space on your main hard drive that contains other deleted data.

If you don't have another hard drive, then DiskInternals Uneraser and other DiskInternals products featured on this site have a unique ability to save files direct to writeable CD without creating any temporary files on the hard drive. This exclusive capability makes these products safe to use in any situation giving the greatest chance of a successful recovery.

Recover deleted emails

Emails are not stored separately as individual files. Each mail folder is a separate file, within which the emails are stored. Consequently, you need to use completely different tools to recover them.

If you deleted emails and wish to restore them, then they may have been stored in the Deleted Items folder (Outlook Express) or similar. This gives you a chance of recovering them, like a Recycle Bin for emails. However, Outlook Express has an option to clear the contents of the Deleted Items folder whenever you close the program, so the messages you want may not be found there.

After a message has been deleted from a mail folder (or from Deleted Items) the space it occupied is left empty until the mail program compacts the folder. Until this occurs, deleted messages are recoverable using mail recovery software.

The following tools can be used to recover deleted emails:

Undelete software

There are a number of undelete software tools that can recover deleted files, but not all of them are very reliable. For Windows, Tech-Pro.net has tested and recommends Uneraser, an excellent deleted files recovery tool that is very easy to use.The latest version can show thumbnail image previews of many recoverable files. For Mac users we suggest Data Rescue II.

If you need to recover files of a specific type, such as a Microsoft Word document or photo images, and if the files were not recently deleted, you may stand a better chance of success using specialist data recovery software. The reason is that this type of data recovery software uses a different recovery methodology. It understands and recognizes the structure of the type of file you want to recover, instead of trying to find pointers to the deleted data.

Where undelete software may recover files that are partially corrupt, the specialist products may be able to recover the files intact. Unfortunately there are no guarantees. Once the operating system has overwritten all traces of part of a file, there is no possibility of a successful recovery.

The following data recovery products can be used under Windows to recover files of specific types:

Related products