Do you need to recover lost files, photos or documents? You're sure that a file was on your hard disk
some time ago, but now it seems to have disappeared? Perhaps you archived some files or photos to CD
or DVD to save disk space and now the disk is corrupt or unreadable? Or perhaps your computer won't
boot up, and you don't have a backup!
If this is the situation then it may seem as if all is lost. But don't panic! Your data is almost certainly still
on your hard drive somewhere, and can almost certainly be recovered. To get the best chance of a
successful data recovery you just need to choose the right tool for the job. This article will help you find
your way through the maze of data recovery software to find the right product for your particular
recovery task.
Accidental deletion is the most common cause of lost data. Modern operating systems provide
protection against accidentally deleting files. In Windows, it's called the Recycle Bin. It's basically a
special folder to which files are moved when they are deleted. As far as the operating system is
concerned files that are deleted to the Recycle Bin are not really deleted at all. If you think you have
deleted a file, the Recycle Bin should be the first place that you look.
If you empty the Recycle Bin, or Shift+Delete a file, then the file becomes deleted as far as the operating
system is concerned. The file disappears from any folder listing and the disk space occupied by the data
becomes available for re-use. But the data is not physically erased from the disk. The disk space still
contains the data. And it is not re-used immediately. What data recovery products do is find ways to
locate this data so that the files can be undeleted or unerased.
When files are deleted, a lot of pointers to the data are still left lying around. Because of this, recovering
deleted files can be treated as a special case as far as data recovery goes. It's a lot quicker than a full
data recovery, which requires locating the contents of lost files with no additional pointers at all. Some
data recovery tools will only recover deleted files.
If a file was deleted a long time ago, or if a drive has been formatted, repartitioned, restored from a
backup or damaged by a destructive virus then a full data recovery will be necessary. The essential
difference between this and a deleted files data recovery is that it is assumed that the existing file
system will contain no information at all about the lost data. So the data recovery software scans the
raw data on the drive looking for clues that your files existed.
If your data still exists on the drive then this type of data recovery will usually find it. However, it will
find a lot of incomplete file fragments as well, which in most cases are useless. The data recovery
software will also not be able to tell you the filename of any of the files it finds by this method, because
that information comes from the file system.
You will need to do a lot of work hunting through the results of the data recovery to find the files you
are looking for. So it helps to choose a data recovery product that can make this task a bit easier for you,
by providing searching and filtering tools and a good preview function.
To recover lost files we recommend Partition Recovery for Windows. This has the best searching and
previewing capabilities of any data recovery software we are aware of. To save some cost, if you know
the file system that was in use on the drive containing the lost files, you can use FAT Recovery or NTFS
Recovery, which have similar functionality to Partition Recovery but are limited to one type of file
system.
Data Recovery Wizard is a simpler data recovery tool that can also perform a full lost file recovery.
However it has more limited searching and previewing features than the products mentioned above.