How do I undelete a file(s)?

xraydog

I deleted an entire folder of stuff from My Documents in WinXP that I need. I thought the folder was empty so I sent it to the recycle bin and emptied the recycle bin. Anyway to get my folder and the files within it back?

X5

Edited, I suppose google-fu would have edumacated me. It appears I have been under the wrong impression for quite some time in regards to deleted schwag.

robaal

X5 wrote: »

If you deleted it, and emptied the recycle bin.

Or if you shift+deleted it. It is gone forever.

There are data recovery solutions. But they are mega expensive, and by mega i mean, a few thousand dollars, and are generally only feasible for corporate emergencies, or the unbelievably rich

That's just not true. It's trivial to recover deleted files if nothing has been written to the same partition in the meantime and you can do it for free, IIRC the only lost data is the first letter of the filename.

I think FreeUndelete was the thing I'm thinking of; you'll have to dig through other deleted files to find the ones you want.


The reason for this is that "deleting" a file just "marks" the space it uses as free to write to - it doesn't destroy the data right away (ie. write zeros in its place or something) but just overwrites it when writing something later.

xraydog

I tried using the program above but all I'm getting is nonsense files with nonsense filenames. Lots of them too. Looks like its picking out deleted browsing history as well. How will I know which ones to recover?

robaal

I had to install it myself to see how to do it, as I used it, like, once.

Go into C:\Documents and settings\<your username>\My Documents (or <username's> documents) and sort by status - the recent deletions will be in the best condition

EDIT: BE SURE TO CHANGE THE SAVE PATH to another partition
editedit: oh, hey, it looks like the app won't even let you save to the same partition; if you don't have one then I'm guessing a thumbdrive or an external hard drive would work too

devoir

If you've been using the same PC since you deleted the files, you're probably going to be unable to recover most of what you've lost.