How to recover deleted files

When you've lost a file or files - perhaps you deleted some documents accidentally from your computer hard disk or camera memory card - don't suffer heart failure. You may be able to recover them. (It's worth checking first to see if you can retrieve them from the recycle bin.) If there hasn't been much activity on the drive since the files were deleted, you can probably recover them.

Recovering your deleted data may be possible because when you delete files, the information they contain is not permanently erased from the drive: it is merely instructed by the system that the files have deleted status. However, this means that the memory space occupied by the deleted files is now available to be overwritten, so when you need to recover them it is vital that nothing else write file data to the disk.

You'll need undelete software to perform the recovery task on your deleted files. There are a number of freeware or shareware recover-file programs which run under Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 and which generally work well to find and restore the files that are easiest to recover, even after a hard disk format. For partition recovery or more advanced files, a paid solution may be necessary. Have a look at Recuva, which is a free software tool available for download.

Don't put your recover program on the same volume as the deleted files. How to stop your rescue items being corrupted: work from an external USB stick and recover your files to that.