How to Recover Deleted Files for Free. Accidentally deleting files is easy to do. Its a sickening feeling when you realise what youve 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 its 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 well explain why below. OPVII6A4MAR9MKEcc4BaftF-i7j4M-5XF9s22bzR_UERw4jdvohR3HVPCg3ZwGOSeGtgIw=w1200-h630-p' alt='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' title='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' />Everyone is freaking out about the season seven premiere of Game of Thronesand youre totally behind. Dont worry, you can catch up and be ready to watch with. Windows XP Free Download Live CD ISO bootable image. Download Windows XP Live CD ISO bootable image full version installer. Windows XP is an operating system. Here were using Disk Digger, but most file recovery utilities work the same way, and well recommend some alternatives if this doesnt work for you. Download Disk Digger, extract the contents of the Zip folder and run the. 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 youve just deleted something you didnt 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. Dont 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 theres 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 youve emptied the Recycle Bin too hastily, or perhaps youre overly fond of the Shift Delete shortcut which bypasses the Recycle Bin and actually deletes the data. Were still tying to wean ourselves off this unhelpful habit. 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 emailHave 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 there are plenty of programs including Disk Digger and PC Inspector File Recovery which might be able to bring them back. There are lots of others too Recuva. Paragon Rescue Kit 1. Free. CGSecurity Photo. Rec. Minitool Partition Wizard Free Edition 9. 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. Its a bit like crossing out the address on an envelope the contents are still in it, but a postman wouldnt 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 thats happened, your data is gone for good. So, the sooner you realise youve accidentally deleted a file, the better your chances of recovering it. When you notice your loss, dont save anything to the disk and dont even download or install a file recovery utility if the file was on your PC or laptops hard drive as it might overwrite the very files youre 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 FAT1. FAT3. 2 or ex. FAT and you should select software with the necessary support for all your media. Undeleting files from a NAS drive. Another drawback with most undelete utilities is that they wont work with networked storage, i. NAS drives. The disks in a NAS drive are under the control of the drives own operating system usually a Linux variant so software running under Windows isnt typically able to attempt a recovery. If youve accidentally deleted a file it might just be in the NAS drives own recycle bin if enabled in which case you might be able to recover it, so first check the documentation. If the file is properly deleted, though, there are only two options Provided you dont mind getting to grips with the insides of the NAS drive and your PC, it might be possible to remove the disks from the NAS and attach them directly to your PC. Now it becomes possible to use a Windows undelete utility, but with two provisos. First, your NAS drive might use a different file system from the drive in your PC so youll have to check the NAS drives documentation to select suitable software. Second, if your NAS drive uses a RAID array, your file might be distributed between more than one physical disk. Some recovery software is able to handle RAID arrays but, again, you need to bear this in mind in making your selection. If you dont fancy dismantling your NAS drive and selecting suitable software, the other option is to send your array off to a professional data recovery company. Recovering corrupt files. Another way files can be lost is if they become corrupted. This could happen, for example, if a power failure occurred while a file was being written, leaving the disk directory in an unpredictable state. As with accidentally deleted files, the data could all be there but Windows wouldnt know where to find it. Often this sort of problem will manifest itself by Windows reporting some sort of error when you try to open a file or, conceivably, files could just have disappeared, even though youre pretty sure you hadnt deleted them. Software utilities are available to identify and correct this sort of error and youll find that some undelete products also offer the ability to recover from logical errors in the file system. While some pure undeletion utilities are free, youll often have to pay for those more fully featured products. How to Recover Data from a Crashed Hard Drive. The complete guide to hard drive recovery. Successful hard drive recovery is important to everyone, because you have important and potentially irreplaceable data and files. Whether the data has been lost due to a hard disk drive crash, or the computer has stopped working for some other reason, this article shows you how to safely recover your data and potentially save a lot of money by doing it yourself. This step by step guide shows you how. If you have difficulties or dont want to do it yourself, information and links are provided below for hard disk recovery services by professionals. Read on to give yourself the best chance to recover your files. Last updated November 4, 2. I originally wrote this article back in 2. I keep it updated with all the latest and greatest hard disk recovery information. Good luck and I hope you recover your data If you are a tech, then you probably know that hard drive failures are inevitable. Chances are that sooner or later it will happen to someone you support or possibly even you. The good news is that there are lots of great recovery tools and methods out there and I would like to share them with you. Please take this as a reminder to start a proper back up routine. You may want to buy an external hard drive to make it easier, and they are handy to carry with you. Step 1 Connect the Hard Drive to Another Computer. USB to IDE SATA hard drive connector. Before you can do any work on the crashed drive you will need to remove it from the current machine unless it is an external drive that has crashed and connect it to another machine as a secondary drive. The best way to do this is to buy and use a USB to IDESATA adapter. This is the cheapest multi functional USB 3 option and I prefer USB 3 because it is a lot faster. If you dont have one available then you may be able to connect the drive to another desktop computer internally as a secondary drive, though this means pulling apart another computer to install the crashed drive. If you do, make sure that the machine detects the drive in the BIOS or you wont be able to access it once the computer starts up. Step 2 Try to Copy the Data to Another Drive. After you connect the drive to another computer either internally or with the USB adapter, check to see if you can browse the contents of the drive. It is worth trying because maybe it wasnt the drive itself that actually crashed. If you can, try to copy data off that you would like to recover. This might not work if you are trying to recover data from a dead hard drive but there is a chance that only the operating system is corrupt and the user data is still fine. Step 3 Download and Try Data Recovery Software. If you cant manually copy the user data off then you can try to recover it using data recovery software. Whatever you do, do not write anything to the drive that you are trying to recover data from. This means you should not install the recovery software onto the drive that you are trying to recover data from. Doing so could actually overwrite files that are still hidden there and that you can still restore. PC Hard Drive Recovery Option 1 Recuva. Recuva software for hard disk recovery. Click here to get Recuva which is a free hard drive recovery tool from Piriform the makers of CCleaner and is one of the best free PC data recovery tools available. Even if the drive has been formatted, Recuva can scan the drive to recover files. If the basic scan fails, there is also a deep scan to discover more deeply buried results. There is also a portable version if you dont want to install the full version. When you launch Recuva, you will be presented with a wizard that will guide you through restoring your files. First you will choose the type of file you need to recover, then the location, and then start the scan or choose Enable Deep Scan if the quick scan doesnt find the files you need to recover. Option 2 PC Inspector File Recovery. PC Inspector for Hard Disk Recovery. Click here to get PC Inspector File Recovery which is the recovery software that I originally featured in this article back in 2. Its still a decent recovery tool and can be used if you are unable to recover the files you need with Recuva. When you launch PC Inspector File Recovery, you will need to choose your language. After this, you will be presented with a welcome screen giving you three options. The first option is Recover Deleted Files. This allows you to restore files that have been permanently deleted from the drive. This will only work if the deleted file has not already been overwritten. The second option is Find Lost Data. This allows you to recover data that has been lost due to a system crash. If you choose this option, you will be asked for the start cluster and end cluster. Leave the default settings to scan the whole drive. The scan could take a couple of hours depending on how large your drive is. The third option is Find Lost Drive. Use this option if your drive letter is not showing up in Windows Explorer or My Computer. It will attempt to connect to the drive and if successful, allow you to browse the data. Option 3 Hirens Boot. CDClick here to get Hirens Boot. CD which allows you to boot into a slimmed down version of Windows called Mini. XP from the bootable CD or bootable flash drive and run diagnostic utilities on a problematic computer. Recuva is one of the utilities that comes bundled with Hirens so you can run it right from the CD. This is helpful if you dont have a USB to IDESATA adapter or just dont want to pull the drive from the machine. You will need to connect another drive to the machine such as a USB flash drive or an external hard drive so you will have a place to copy your recovered data to. Option 4 Get. Data. Back. Get Data Back for hard drive data recovery. If the free utilities are not doing the trick then Click here to get Get. Data. Back and give it a try. Get. Data. Back is sold in two different versions, one for NTFS and the other for FAT files systems. American Express Forbearance Programs there. If you want to make sure its going to work first before you pay 7. NTFS version or 6. FAT version, they do have a demo free version that will allow you to see what files it can recover. This gives you a zero cost option to check if your hard drive data recovery will be possible. If you like what you see, you can purchase the full version right then and there without even having to close out of the program. I personally have had lots of success with Get. Data. Back when other recovery methods have failed. After launching Get. Data. Back you will be asked to pick from a selection of data loss scenarios that the drive experienced. If you arent sure, just select I dont know. After this you will select the drive, the partition on that drive, and then start the scan. Mac Hard Drive Recovery Software Mini. Tool Mac Data Recovery. Mac Data Recovery for hard drive data recovery. Links To Free Download Solidworks 2014. Click here to get Mini. Tool Mac Data Recovery which is a data recovery tool specifically designed for Mac OS X. Its one of the few free Mac data recovery programs which is why I have featured it here, however, it still has a 1. GB recovery limit. After that you must pay for the full version. When you launch Mini.