Recover Lost or Deleted Computer Files
December 24, 2009 by admin
Filed under Computer Tips
Recover Lost or Deleted Computer Files
Anyone who owns a computer might have gone through the ‘Did I just delete that?’ experience. Every time you delete a file, you might not be able to recover it, but through these easy tips, there are times when you can.
Instructions
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Step 1
This step might sound silly, but its the first thing you should do. Check your Recycle Bin, by double clicking on the icon. You might have accidentally pressed the delete button on the keyboard. If you do find it here, right-click on the file and select ‘Restore’ from the menu. Your file will then be restored to its original location.
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Step 2
If you were not lucky enough to find the file in the Recycle Bin, look for a backup of your computer’s data. If your PC is connected to a network, chances are that the files on your PC have regular back-ups. That being the case, you can check with the System Admin to see if he/she can help you get back a copy of the files you have lost.
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Step 3
If no back-ups are available, try to repair the hard disk with the disk-repair utility which comes with your OS.
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Step 4
If step 3 fails, then you can use a commercial file-recovery utility. One such software is ‘Glary Utilities’, which can be downloaded and installed for free from the internet. Ideally, the file-recovery software should not be installed on the disk that you want to retrieve the data from. Else, you might overwrite the data you’re trying so hard to recover. When a file gets deleted, the OS does not erase the memory locations of that file, until it needs that space for something else. Hence, there is a possibility of retrieving at least some of the lost data.
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Step 5
Finally, if the file-recovery software fails and the data that you lost is extremely important, send the disk to a drive-recovery service.
They may do the job and I say ‘may’, since there is no certainty. Irrespective of whether they do the job or not, you will feel the pinch of a few hundred dollars. So, does backing up your data regularly from this point on sound like a good plan?
