How to Recover Deleted Files on Your Computer

Computer is becoming necessary in our everyday life, not just a toy or accessories anymore. As we put more time on it, sometimes you accidentally delete your important files from your hard drive, but you don't have to panic as it is easy to recover deleted files yourself. You can undo the deletion and restore files for sure as long as you have the best undelete software installed and act immediately once you realize that your files are gone. Here is how to restore deleted files using Windows PCs or Mac OS.

What are the chances of recovery?

A deleted file can be undeleted or recovered right after it has been gone and for some time afterwards, because the operating system will not reuse space from the deleted files immediately. But the chances of perfect data recovery will decrease the longer you leave the situation, as some or all of the space will be reused by the system eventually. The chances of data recovery will also depend on how full the hard drive is. Windows operating system will try to avoid reusing disk space that has been recently freed, in order to give recovery software a better chance of performing its task. But as the drive gets near to its full capacity, there will be better chance of free space gets reused by other files sooner. If you happen to defragment the hard drive since the file was deleted, then this will seriously affect the chances of a file recovery process. The free space left by deleted files will be occupied by current files due to fragmentation process, making it much less likely that undelete software could find anything useful.

Recover deleted files effectively

No operating system will provide any tool to recover deleted files as a standard, so you would need to use 3rd party undelete software.

Undelete software will understand the internals of the operating system that was used to store files on a disk and find exact location of the disk space that was occupied once by a deleted file. As the space won't be reused immediately after the file was deleted, there is still a very good chance of successful data recovery using this software. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, there are third party tools available such as Uneraser and Data Recovery Wizard. They are reported to use thorough search mechanism and the most sophisticated data recovery algorithms to provide best possible recovery rates. It can even restore files from lost or corrupted partitions.

Saving the recovered data

One thing you must remember is that you should not write to the disk that contains the files that you would like to recover, because if you do so the space will be overwritten and the data will be lost. Instead, you should save the files to a separate drive such as external drive, network share or USB memory stick. And always be cautious not to drop or lose it as it might contain your security data that other people can easily get an access to.

There is online resource with more details and advice on Data Recovery and security issue. Learn about How to recover deleted files and information on data security issue.

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