Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 112: Resurrect Deleted Files

Level Medium

Platform Windows

Cost Free

When you delete files from your computer’s hard drive, the data is not actually erased. In reality, the space it occupies is marked as available for your operating system to overwrite with new data.

As a result, special file-recovery undelete programs can often resurrect deleted files from the space on your disk marked as free (which still holds fragments of the old file). Although sometimes you don’t ever want your deleted files to see the light of day again, in the case of accidental deletion, an undelete process can retrieve what you thought was permanently lost data.

The moment you realize you’ve accidentally deleted files you want back, stop. Those files may still be on disk, but any computer activity that writes to disk may overwrite whatever’s left of them and render them unrecoverable. Don’t restart your computer (boot up writes temp files to disk) and don’t do any other work on the machine; instead, get straight to the recovery process.

Download the portable version of Recuva, a free undelete utility, from www.piriform.com/recuva/download/portable and unzip it, preferably using a computer other than the one where your deleted files live. If that’s not possible, save and unzip the file to an external drive (such as a USB drive). Recuva can restore deleted files on your Windows PC’s hard drive or on external disks such as a digital camera memory card and USB stick. To recover files with Recuva, follow ...