Recover accidentally deleted files

I disabled my trashbin by default which means that deleted items bypass the trashbin and are deleted immediately. This works fine most of the time but it happens that I occasionally delete a file that I need later on again. There is no obvious way to get those files back and you will face serious troubles if want to get them back but used something like defragmentation on that hard drive after the deletion.

The question that some might ask is why one could recover deleted files at all. This is actually a very good question. Windows does not delete the file at all when you press the delete button. It simply deleted the reference to that file and makes the space the file occupied writable again. This means that you can recover most files if you are just fast enough. One freeware that can do the job is Recuva which is supposed to be pronounced recover.

It is developed by the same team that created CCleaner. Recuva scans the hard drive that you have selected and displays all deleted files that it finds in a list. It found more than 60000 files on my E: drive that I could try and recover. Information like filename, path and size are displayed to make it easier to find the files that you want to recover.

Recuva has fortunately a filter option. Just enter part of the filename or path and it will display only those files. It took 53 seconds to scan my 140 GB partition and display the 60000 entries.