While we’ve discussed ways to hide your data, and even methods for utterly destroying your data, there’s a far more important procedure everyone should be familiar with: How to recover lost data.
It happens to everyone. You accidentally drag more than one item to the trash, for example. Panic ensues. In this scenario, however, all you need to do is open the trash, select what you want to recover, and drag it back out of there.
However, if you deleted the trash before you realised your error, then things get trickier. Your first step is to NOT write any new data to the hard drive. Your lost/deleted file is probably recoverable, because the hard drive space it occupied has not been overwritten – yet. Once it has been overwritten, then the file is lost. But if you stop what you’re doing, you have an excellent chance of recovery. (This is all assuming you don’t have a backup of the file already – which you really should have, for this very reason, and others).
The reason you have a chance of getting your precious file(s) back is because there are some great data recovery tools out there. Some will even do more than just grab deleted files; they’ll perform entire hard drive repairs.
Here’s our choice of four pieces of software which can help you get your precious files back…
MiniTool Power Data Recovery
This is simply the most powerful file recovery software we’ve seen for Windows. It finds files the competition doesn’t and will save them to any medium, even burn them to a DVD. Plus, it includes disk imaging for backup of a failing disk, so you can do a recovery even if the hard drive dies. There’s a free trial version available on the website, too.
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