Tendo

Data Recovery is a process to recover accidentally deleted or formatted files from your computer including common storage devices such as external or internal hard drive, USB, CD/DVD, memory card etc. Such files can be restored if proper actions are taken immediately or as soon as possible.

Data recovery software is indeed a great way to have your deleted files back, though it may require you to invest money and time. Recovery software can make use of sophisticated algorithm to deeply scan files that is mark as deleted or lost in MBR and treat them carefully to recover exactly as they were deleted.

However, we’ll discuss about some manual ways to recover your lost or deleted files without using such recovery software. It’s strongly advised to not to save or overwrite any more data on the problem storage device as it’ll make your attempts failed of recovering lost or deleted data.

Restore deleted files (Manual method)
Accidental deletion of files and folders- Perhaps, you’re cleaning your system by deleted unnecessary and junk files to free up some hard disk space. However, accidentally you may have deleted an important files or folders that you badly needed.  Unluckily, you can’t file those files in the recycle bin as you’ve chosen to delete it permanently by pressing ‘shift + delete’.

Resolution:  In some cases, you should see your computer recycle bin folder to see if the deleted files are there. You can right click on it and choose ‘Restore’ to save them back to their original destination. However, if you can’t found files what you’re looking for, try following the steps mentioned below:

a.    Right click on folder containing your files deleted previously.
b.    Choose ‘Properties’ and go to ‘Previous versions tab’.
c.    This will list all the previous version of files existed previously (Before deletion). Select file which you want to restore and click on ‘Restore’ button to restore those files back to your system.

What if the files were deleted from the Desktop folder?   

For example, if you have deleted files from the desktop folder named ‘XYZ’. Try creating a new folder with exactly the same name i.e. ‘XYZ’. Moving further, right click on the same and go to its ‘Properties’. Under ‘previous version’ tab, you should see all the deleted files located under the folder. Simply, choose any or all the files you want and hit on restore button.

However, make the system protection is set to turned on. Follow the steps below to check and make sure the system protection is ON:

Other type of deletion that can’t be addressed manually
Partition Format- If you’ve accidentally formatted or deleted an entire partition, you might be in trouble as you can’t be able to restore them manually. Instead, you should seek for professional and efficient partition undelete software that can scans and recover data from formatted or deleted partition.

While working with a computer system, it is a common scenario that some of the user files get deleted due to some reason or he himself deleted it accidentally or intentionally. There can be various other reasons that can cause Windows file deletions. Possible reasons could be corrupt logical structure of the hard drive, partition header corruption due to virus or malware, power surges while working with partition data, partition corruption due to hardware issues, bad sectors in hard drive, bad RAM etc.

Suppose a file/folder has been deleted from Windows 7 and Later on, the user requires getting it back then how to undelete files in Windows 7?

In this article, I am going to discuss the methods for retrieving important files from Windows 7 system.

If some file is missing, you might have placed it somewhere or got it deleted. Use the Windows Explorer or File Explorer search feature to search for the lost file.

Recover files from recycle bin: If haven’t deleted the files permanently, you can restore it back from Recycle Bin. If the number of deleted files in recycle bin is large you can simply search the file by name or right-click in the window, point to Sort By, and select Date Deleted to view files

What if you have deleted an item and emptied the recycle?

If you don’t find your files in the recycle bin, you can look for it at cloud storage services (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive). Just log into your cloud account, go to trash and recover your files from there, if found.

Recover files from backup: If you have a recent backup, you can restore the deleted file from there.

Note: You must backup your important data on regular intervals. So that in case of data loss situations you can restore it back. You can restore data using the built-in Windows backup tools too. Windows 7’s previous versions can create virtual image of your files automatically and lets you restore them to a previous versions using System Restore functionality. In Windows 8, you are given one more recovery option i.e. ‘File History’ that isn’t available in previous versions and can be used to create exact copy of your stored data to an external storage device (external hard drive, USB, Flash drive or any similar kind of storage device).

Procedure to undelete files in Windows7 from a recent backup or previous versions is given below.

Note: Windows Backup doesn’t provide you this facility for viewing the previous versions. If restore button isn’t available, open and save the file at some other location instead of restoring/replacing the current version.

If some data on your Windows drive has been lost and you cannot find it anywhere else, stop using the drive immediately and seek for an alternative to get them recovered. If you are performing operations with drive then the deleted data can be overwritten and recovery becomes more difficult.

So the first thing is shut down the computer immediately. Scan your drive using an efficient Windows data recovery software. If you could find your file in the scan results, you can recover it and save to your desired location.   

Note: Before applying any data recovery tool, it’s advisable to make a copy of your drive. Better you remove the problematic hard drive from the computer and attach it as a secondary drive in some other computer. Then scan it using an efficient Windows data recovery software.

If all of the above recovery methods fail, seek some professional data recovery company. They deal with physical as well logical data corruption. Using powerful recovery methods, they provide you the recovered drive data, all you need to do is ‘pay for the services’.

Sometimes the corruption/data loss is much severe that no full data recovery is possible at all. Then sorry to say you have lost some or all of your precious data! To avoid such situations, you must always backup your data on regular intervals, also enable the File History or Windows Backup features.