Cleared Recycle Bin and accidentally lost an important file? Here’s how to recover it

Am sure all of us have done it at some point of time i.e. just cleared out our Recycle Bins and then to our horror realised that some really important file has also taken a hike with it. Or maybe you were simply trying to act tech savvy on your friend’s computer and used Shift+Del to successfully wipe out a large chunk of his folders. Wooops !! 😀 There’s nothing one can do as such but to gawk at own stupidity under such circumstances. Well, not really !! As long as the file-system in use is NTFS, there is an east way out. NTFS Undelete is an excellent freeware tool that can recover almost any deleted file – whether it was deleted directly from the hard drive or from the Recycle Bin.

Is this some miracle tool that can recover any deleted file?

Well, almost! When a file is deleted, it’s contents still remain intact on the hard drive. However, the space it occupies is flagged as free and made available to any program requesting space to write a file. So the next file saved to the disk may actually overwrite the contents of the deleted file. Thus, if there’s no other disk write activity after you deleted your file there’s a 100% chance of getting it back.

Disk Write Activity! File Recovery! That sounds complicated…

Not at all. Recovering lost files using this software is as easy as working with Windows Explorer – which most of you are ultra-familiar with. In fact the software’s interface is almost identical to Windows Explorer and consists of a 2 pane view. When you select a particular drive / folder it takes a couple of seconds to scan through it and presents you with a list of files, just like Explorer except that in this case the deleted files are marked with a red cross.

The software is available for free download in the form of a Windows Installer (.msi) file as well as an ISO image that can be burnt on a CD and run directly.

Get NTFS Undelete …