Something that most of us will do in our computing lives is accidentally deleting files. Sometimes people will empty the recycle bin without checking its contents, press SHIFT+DELETE on a file or folder (which deletes it without going to the recycle bin) or delete a file or folder from the command line. All of these operations will make the file or folder disappear in Windows and is seemingly lost forever. Luckily for us nothing is ever really deleted on your computer unless something else takes place on the hard drive; Chances are that your files are recoverable.

Today we look at Restoration, a free tool that helps you restore accidentally deleted files. It is effective at recovering deleted files and it doesn’t require any sort of installation so you can store it on a USB drive if you like. Click here to download a copy of Restoration.

How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Files

1) To use Restoration, simply choose the Hard Drive which your deleted file was originally on from the drop-down list in the upper right. For example, I want to recover the file F:\test.txt that I just deleted by press SHIFT+DELETE, so I will choose F: drive.

2) Click the Search Deleted File button, the program will scan the target hard drive for deleted files.

3) When the scanning procedure is complete, it will show a list of files that are recoverable.

4) Click the Restore By Copying button to restore the files. Be sure to restore them to another partition or drive to avoid the risk of overwriting the original information you are trying to recover.

This method solves all file loss problems – recovering files emptied from Recycle Bin, formatted hard drive or lost partition and other unknown reasons under Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7.