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Find a missing file

It’s happened to us all. We’ve either accidentally deleted a file we intended to save or the personal computer has frozen and we have had to reboot, losing all the work that we hadn’t saved.  In the bad old days a reboot provided no way to recover lost work. These days most modern software will automatically recover any work it deems lost when the machine restarts.

Easy recovery

The accidental deletion of a file is normally easy to recover from. Just visit the Recycle Bin, find the file in question and click restore to make it reappear wherever you had saved it on your hard disk drive.] If the file has gone from the Recycle Bin do not despair, as it may still be recoverable. You see, when you delete a file it only becomes invisible to your operating system. It is  not actually wiped from the hard disk drive until the space it occupies is needed for some other data. So that precious school project or those irreplaceable photos may not be gone.

Software tips

There are several pieces of software that can be used to recover the deleted files. They work by scanning your hard disk drive for those partially deleted files and piece everything back together for you. Try www.piriform.com/recuva for Piriform’s excellent free tool Recuva, www.recovermyfiles.com or my personal favourite, Get Data Back from www.runtime.org.

If none of these pieces of software work, it may be because a hard drive has become physically damaged, from a knock or a faulty part, so it’s worth taking your machine to a data recovery company. Find the nearest company using www.yellowpages.co.nz under “Data Recovery” but ring them first to get a quote. Some recovery jobs can be very expensive but many of these companies will provide an assessment for a small fee so you can decide if your lost data is worth the cost.

Look through Windows

If you’ve lost your documents by upgrading your operating system to Windows 7, before you panic, type “windows.old” in the Windows Search box by clicking on the Microsoft orb in the bottom left of the screen. The folder should be on you C drive and contain all your documents from your previous Windows installation.

Of course, making a regular back up of your data, through Windows built in Backup and Recovery Centre or some third party software can help. But your recovery is only as good as your last backup.

Deliberate deletion

If, on the other hand, you want to sell a computer (TradeMe is usually the way to go) you can remove your files from your machine before wiping the hard drive using something like www.secure-delete.net or www.DBAN.com. These tools will prevent the new owner from recovering the personal files you have removed and we highly recommend using them.