Home ->
Data Recovery Articles -> RECOVERING DELETED FILES After You Have Emptied the Recycle Bin
RECOVERING DELETED FILES After You Have Emptied the Recycle Bin
RECOVERING DELETED FILES After You Have Emptied the Recycle Bin, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email, photo, database and more files...
EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard restores deleted files no longer in the Recycle Bin. It can recover deleted Word, Excel, PowerPoint, photo, Email, database, and all document formats and folders in Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, which have been emptied from or by-passed the Windows Recycle Bin.
Why can you recover deleted files?
Emergency file recovery requires more than the correct tool, though. It requires knowing how file deletion occurs, and what you have to do to maximize the chances of a successful recovery.
When a file is deleted from your computer, its contents aren't immediately destroyed. Windows simply marks the hard drive space as being available for use by changing one character in the file table so that the file entry won't be displayed in My Computer or a commandline DIR command, etc. If you manage to start an undeletion process before Windows uses that part of the hard drive to write a new file, all you have to do is set that flag back to "on" and you get the file.
Obviously, the sooner you try to restore a file, the more successful you'll be. But stop a moment and think about the other things that could cause this part of the hard drive to be overwritten. If your hard drive is pretty full, the odds are much greater that Windows will grab your precious unallocated space for its next write. Or, if you defrag the hard drive, you run the risk of unused parts of the drive being overwritten! (This also means that if you are running silent background defrag services like Diskeeper, or if you have defrag utilities scheduled to defrag automatically, you might get blindsided - lose your chance at data recovery - if you don't halt them until you have your deleted file recovered.
For that matter, simply starting up Windows or, to a lesser extent, shutting down Windows causes many tiny files to be written. You really want to avoid these processes if at all possible.
So the first rule is: STOP USING THAT COMPUTER IMMEDIATELY! THIS MINUTE! RIGHT NOW! Use another computer to get the EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard you will need.
This is also one of the places where well-planned partitioning of your hard drive has a huge advantage. Partitions physically mark off different parts of the hard drive. If, for example, you have your data and program files on their own separate partitions, and it's a data file that you want to recover (which is usually the case), then Windows startup or shutdown won't touch that part of the hard drive. If you have the swapfile / pagefile on its own partition, and all of your directories for temporary files on another, then these most-changing and most-written files also will be kept from overwriting the part of the drive holding the files you want to recover. However, if you take that 80 GB hard drive and make it all one big single C: partition, then you run the risk of making your file unrecoverable anytime the swapfile resizes, or any time Windows writes a temporary file of any kind... and this could be pretty much at any moment whatsoever! Partitioning gives enormous advantage in file recovery.
If you accidentally deleted the file, steps:
1. Double-click on the Recycle Bin in Windows or the Trash on a Mac to see if the file is still there.
2. If you find the file, drag it to the desktop. To return the file to its original location in Windows, click on the file and select Restore from the drop-down menu.
3. If the file is no longer in the Recycle Bin or the Trash, look for a backup. If your PC is on a network that has regular backups, check with the system administrator to see if it's possible to retrieve a saved copy of the file.
4. Try using our commercial file recovery utility - EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard that scans the disk for recognizable data. When you delete a file, the operating system probably won't erase the actual bits from the disk until it needs them for something else; therefore, you may be able to recover some data.
5. If you decide to use EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, don't install it on the same disk that you're hoping to retrieve the file from, or you might overwrite the data you're trying to recover. Launch the software from a CD-ROM or a External hard drive. And if you download it directly from the Internet, don't download it onto the disk from which you deleted the file.