How To Retrieve A Deleted File

Your first reaction if you've just accidentally deleted a file on your computer is probably to go to the recycle bin. Depending on where you deleted the file from, there's a reasonable probability that your file will be showing there and you can just right click your mouse and select "Restore".

But what can you do if the file doesn't show up in your recycle bin? Does that mean that it's been lost forever? Murphy's Law says that files deleted by accident are usually ones that you haven't got a backup of. What a pain!

Forunately it's almost always, it's perfectly possible to get back a deleted file. Even if your recycle bin thinks otherwise. This is because the Windows filing system doesn't delete the file but rather it flags the space occupied as something it can use again when it needs to.

The bad news is that the more you do on your computer, the higher the risk that Windows will overwrite some or all of the lost file, which will make recovering it expensive or maybe not even possible.

So you need to stop what you're doing on your computer. That means stop everything. Including browsing the internet, scanning your iTunes library, and so on. The more time you take to stop, the higher the chance that Windows will think it can re-use the space you've created by deleting the file.

If you can use a different PC, use that to download a file undelete utility like this one. If you can't get hold of a different computer then you may get away with using your current PC (the chance increases if there is a large amount of disk space left unused) but this is definitely not the best way.

Once you've got your copy of a program to undelete files, it's just a matter of pressing "next" most of the time and there's an exceptionally big probability that the software will recover the file you accidentally deleted.

You can download a file undelete program here. It's even got a free trial, so you'll know that it works for you.