It has happened to all of us some time or another: You accidentally deleted a file from your hard drive, and the recycle bin is empty, or you deleted the wrong photograph from your digital camera, or that very important paper you have to turn in tomorrow simply disappeared from your USB drive. At a time like this, the only thing going through your head is OH NO! Just breath, and don’t panic. You can recover them.
When you empty the Recycle Bin on Windows and it had the wrong files in it, to your luck, the system isn’t completely deleting them, rather it considers the space that the files once occupied is now free to be overwritten. It becomes a space that will be filled once again when you save other files, or you keep working on the computer.
So, when you start to break out in a cold sweat after realizing that you have just deleted an important folder along with the actual garbage in the Recycle Bin, you have to react quickly and recover the files immediately so that they don’t get overwritten. The more you use your computer after the disaster has happened, the more likely it is that you can’t rescue the files from the newly available space in the Recycle Bin.
There are several programs that allow you to permanently restore files that were accidentally deleted, but one of the most effective and accessible ones for any user is undoubtedly Recuva, developed by Piriform, who are also responsible for the very popular CCleaner. This program is capable of “bringing back to life” those files that your operating system has marked as free space, both on the hard drive and your flash drive.
This free program is as easy as selecting the type of file you want to find inside your computer, and you can filter your search by extension, such as images, music, documents, videos, email, or have it show all file types. Once you access the recovery
assistant, the following window will appear.
Following this, Recuva will ask you to specify the deleted file’s location, and if you can’t remember, the program will search the entire system for you.
Once the local drive has been scanned, Recuva will notify you if the file can be recovered or not, which also tells you if your system has already written new information over that space, or if it is still available. You have to keep in mind that when a storage device deletes a file, it doesn’t actually delete the content, but rather marks the space where it was located as available to be overwritten. If you haven’t saved anything to the hard drive, it’s very likely that you can recover the lost document.
Once the results appear, and unfortunately you see that the file you’re looking for has a red circle next to it, regrettably you won’t be able to recover it at all. But, if the circle is green, congratulations! You will have recovered it just in time.
Download Recuva on Uptodown | http://recuva.en.uptodown.com/
Official website | http://www.piriform.com/recuva
[…] deleted by accident is Recuva, a tool developed by Piriform, who also created the popular CCleaner. In an earlier post we went into detail about the program, but there’s nothing mysterious about the way it works: You […]