31. Recovering Deleted Files

So your two year old has just deleted five hours of essential work? So he somehow managed to avoid the recycling bin altogether in the sort of computer anti-miracle that only the very young and the very tech-phobic seem to be able to achieve? Don't panic. Though the recycling bin is present as a safety net against accidental or mistaken file deletion, just because it's not in there doesn't mean your data is gone forever.

Data that is deleted from a hard drive is not actually removed from the disk. It is simply marked by the operating system as having been deleted, and will be treated as empty disk space from then on. Until it is actually written over by new data, the old data remains and is easy to recover.

To get your data back, you should obtain a copy of Restoration, a free file recovery utility. This program is small, effective and very easy to use, which is why we like it. To recover accidentally deleted files start Restoration...

Choose the drive you wish to scan in the 'drives' drop down box, and click 'search by deleted files.'

A list of deleted files is created. To restore one or more files, highlight them and click 'restore by copying' then choose a target directory.