Losing files can be a devastating turn of events that can have happened in any number of ways. Your operating system could have a software glitch, you could have accidentally deleted files, or your hard drive could have suffered from some sort of physical trauma. No matter why your hard drive has crashed, it still results in the need for data recovery.

In this article, we will talk about recovering inadvertently deleted files. It happens. You got in a hurry and sent your monthly sales report to the recycle bin, rather than to your email program. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, except you have gotten in the groove of automatically emptying your recycle bin as soon as you see "litter" in it. This pretty much defeats the purpose of a recycle bin; however, what's done is done. Your files have been deleted.

They aren't really gone, however. Windows simply marks the files as deleted, and they remain on the hard drive ready to be overwritten. If you immediately take action to undelete the files, your chances are good to recover them completely. If you use the machine or save any files, your deleted data will be overwritten and gone. Un-deleting the file involves changing the flag to mark the files as active again.

What this means for you is that the more quickly that you try to restore your files, the more successful your data recovery efforts will be. If you hard drive is almost full, almost any new write to the drive will destroy your data. In fact, it's safest to remove the hard drive, and connect it to a second pc, either internally or in an external USB enclosure. If the operating system isn't actually running on your drive, there is far less chance that your data will be destroyed. Remember that even startup and shutdown of your computer causes many temporary files to be written. Restoring your files as quickly as possible will insure the greatest probability of successfully recovering your data.

There are many commercially available utility packages that include an undelete utility. However, I've had great success with a freeware package called Undelete-Plus. It's a full featured utility that supports all of the major file systems that Windows can use.