How To Recover Deleted Files On Windows

Accidentally deleting important files is quite common when you have tons of data to delete. In most cases, you should be able to retrieve data from the Recycle Bin but what if you deleted from there too or deleted the file while pressing “Shift” Key (it deletes data permanently instead of sending to Recycle Bin)?

However, you might not be out of luck yet, there is still a chance that you might be able to recover your files using proper tool. When you delete a file it is not actually deleted, it is just removed from the system’s index, but still stays on the Hard drive. The OS just can’t detect the file again, which is why you can’t see it, but with the help of a Data-recovery tool you can recover these files.

Use Recuva to Recover Deleted Data

In this tutorial, we are going to use data-recovery tool Recuva that comes from Piriform that also created other well reputed handy tools like CCleaner, Defraggler and Speccy. Although, there are many data-recovery tools in the market, but we selected Recuva because it is extremely easy to use with the fastest results while completely free to use.

Tip: As you add more data, these deleted files are overwritten. It is advised to use a data-recovery tool as soon as possible to retrieve the data. If you will wait, the important deleted data might get overwritten by new data.

For the sake of tutorial, we are going to first delete files, in order to recover them.

We will delete these three pictures and send them to Recycle Bin and then delete from there too.

Download and install Recuva and launch the program. On the Recuva Wizard just click on Next.

Now, in the next window, we can choose which type of file we would like to recover. As we deleted pictures, we are going to select “Pictures” from the options and click on Next. If you are not sure, you can also select “Other” which means the tool will look for all types of files.

Here choose the file location where the tool should look for it. Try to be as precise as possible to make the process faster and easier to find the file. If you don’t remember the exact location, then choose “I’m not sure”. We last deleted the pictures from Recycle Bin, so we are going to choose the option “In the Recycle Bin” and click on Next. You can specify a location by choosing “In a specific Location” and browsing the file folder.

In the next window, just click on Next again to search for the file. Don’t check the option “Enable deep scan” when you are searching for the file for the first time as in most cases quick scan should be able to retrieve the file. If quick scan doesn’t retrieve the file, then try using deep scan, the deep scan will take an hour or above to retrieve data unlike the quick scan which takes 5-30 seconds.

After processing, it will show all of the deleted files in the selected location from which you can just mark the data which you would like to recover and then click on recover. As you can see, the three pictures we deleted earlier can now be recovered. We will just check these three pictures and click on Recover.

When we click on recover, we will be prompt to choose the location where we would like to save our document. Although it is not compulsory but it is recommended that you choose another drive to save the recover file instead of the file it was first located. Therefore, as these 3 pictures were located in the D drive we are going to save them in the C drive.

As you can see now, these files are properly recovered and we can use them again.

If you wish to continue recovering files you don’t have to start the process again. Just click on “Switch to Advanced mode” and there you can use the drop down menus to choose the drive and file type and just click on “Scan”

From the “options”, you can change different settings such as View mode, Language or just restart the Wizard if you like the step by step process instead of using the advanced mode.

The Red, Orange and Green Circles next to the To-Be recovered files indicate how damaged the file is and what are the chance of its recover, where green means it can be recovered and Red means it might not be recovered or have issues with the recovered file.

Have you been able to recover some files with this tutorial? Let us know.

Karar Haider
Categories: Computers
Tags: Windows