Recover Deleted Files

I delete files most of the time by pressing down the shift key which will delete them immediately without moving them to the trashbin first. It happens from time to time that I deleted a file that I want to recover, sometimes it is because another file depends on the deleted one or it could be that I need to access the information again that was contained in the file. There is unfortunately no direct way to recover the files in windows which means that we have to rely on third party tools to recover lost files.

Undelete Plus is a file recovery freeware that scans your hard drive for deleted files and recovers them for you. It supports the most common file systems such as fat16, fat32 and ntfs and is able to work with removable devices such as flash memory or disk drives as well. A great feature for a freeware file recovery software is the ability to work on network drives as well.

A little bit of background information why Undelete Plus is able to recover deleted files. Many users do not know that files that are deleted are not removed from the system at once. The complete file still exists on the drive but the reference to the file is deleted. File operations on those sectors make it harder to recover those files but the right tools (professional data recovery) can still detect those files.

This is one of the reasons why I would never sell my hard drives at ebay or other websites. The right equipment is able to check on my data and this is something that I do not want to risk. Even if you wipe it carefully there is the possiblity to recover files. Not with tools like Undelete Plus though.

The scan does not take this long until it is complete, on my 300 Gb hard drive it took about 20 minutes. After the scan finishes all files that can be recovered are displayed in the main window. The left window supplies some filters, you can choose that only a certain filetype is displayed for recovery, a certain folder location or a drive. (you may scan more than one drive).

Just mark the files that you want to recover and choose to keep the original folder structure of the files or move them all into a different folder. Undelete Plus found more than 60000 files that could be recovered on my drive which is a big number, I really have to think of a way to wipe them completely after a set number of days.