A Quick Guide to Recovering Accidentally Deleted Files

All of us face the problem of accidentally deleting a much-needed file and then wondering how to get it back. We present here a quick guide to recovering accidentally deleted files.

How many times have you deleted a file believing it to be no longer required only to realize a few weeks later that you still needed some important information from the file? Of course, you may have immediately rushed to the Recycle Bin to see if you could still retrieve it from there. If you were lucky, you may not have emptied your Recycle Bin but if you were to have, then you might have just moved on to dealing with the fact that you had lost your file permanently.

You should first of all be aware that when you delete a file from your computer, you are not doing anything to the file itself other than to tell the computer that you do not need this file anymore. So actually, the file remains where it was on the hard drive; only now the operating system of your computer deals with it as though it is gone. Which means you cannot see it and hence open it or work with it. But then that should make it easy to undelete files, correct? Not entirely.

When you tell the computer that a particular file is not needed, it essentially views the space as free space and it may start writing new data on this at some point of time. For the time being however, your file stays where it is but hidden from your eyes. You might wonder how you will be able to find the particular file that you wish to undelete but most undelete programs come with powerful search facilities that will let you quickly identify the files that you are looking for and then undelete files.

The way most undelete programs work is as follows - they search your NTFS hard drive for files that your computer cannot read but are still located on your hard drive.