Restore Deleted Files in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 for Free

Avoid Writing Anything to Your Hard Drive

This is very important. When files get deleted, they are not truly gone. deleted files are still on your hard drive waiting to be overwritten. If the physical space your lost files stored on gets overwritten, then you have a very low chance of recovering your data.

Therefore, you should stop writing any files to the drive that the lost files occupied. It is also recommended to power off the computer immediately because the longer the computer runs, then the less likely you can have all your files recovered.

How to Easily Restore Deleted Files from Hard Drive

There are 4 methods you can try. You should not restore the files to the original location, because if it fails you may have less chance to restore lost files using the next method.

If you are still worried the risk of trying to recover data by yourself, you can backup your hard drive sector by sector in the next part. Sector by sector backup will backup the used sector which the deleted files occupied.

Way 1: Check Recycle Bin

The first place you should consider is Recycle Bin. The regularly deleted files are saved in Recycle Bin as a safety measure. In Recycle Bin, you can select the items that you want to restore and click the icon Restore the selected items in the upper-left corner. You can also right click on the item and select Restore.

If you do not see your files there, you may have empty the Recycle Bin or you have permanently deleted the files by Press Shift + Delete. In that case, try the next method.

Way 2: Restore files from Windows Previous Versions

Windows likely have taken several shadow copies of your drives, which you probably do not know of. By default, system protection is enabled and it will create restore points (also known as shadow copies) on certain occasions.

With these shadow copies, you can restore your permanently deleted files to previous versions. For example, to restore files saved on Desktop, follow the steps below:

1.   Locate the folder in File Explorer.

2.   Right click on the folder and select Properties.

3.   Click on the Previous Versions tab, and then you can see all the available versions. If no previous versions listed, then system protection may have been turned off.

4.   Select the right version you want to restore and select Restore to instead of Restore.

5.   Select a USB flash drive or other removable storage devices to receive the restored files just in case this method cannot restore all of your deleted files.

If you cannot remember where the deleted files’ location, you can download the free tool Shadow Explorer that will show you all recorded files. From there, you can easily select the deleted files to recover.

Note: you should download the portable version on the removable device. If you install the freeware on your hard drive, there is a chance that the installation will overwrite the files that you need to recover, which decrease the chance of a successful recovery.

Way 3: Use professional data recovery software

Without enabling the System Protection or File History, it’s unlikely for you to restore deleted files from backups made by Previous Versions. But you can try this professional data recovery software, MyRecover.

The more specific you are, the higher chances you can restore deleted files using it.   

★Tips:

 MyRecover can support NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, and ReFS file systems.

Specify the source drive (which saves the deleted files before data loss) and another new drive (which saves the recovered files after recovery).

 The tool will run Quick Scan and Deep Scan automatically. To locate your desired files quickly, you can search files rather than scan the whole hard drive because the latter scanning process may take much longer time.    

Download MyRecover on your Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, or Windows Server computers to restore deleted files!

Step 1. Launch MyRecover on your Windows PC, and select the partition that includes your needed files before data loss. Then click Start Scan.

Step 2. Search your files or wait to view all the deleted and missing files as you prefer.

Step 3. Go to the Deleted Files/Other Missing Files folder, and choose your desired files among all the recoverable files in the window. Then click x files to restore them. Please save these recovered documents in a new drive.

Way 4: Hand it to Data Recovery Professionals

If the methods above cannot restore your files, you do not have any valid backups, and the data lost are very valuable to you, then you should consider data recovery service. Then you should avoid using your computer right now.

data recovery services can be extremely expensive. It may cost you hundreds or more dollars. In addition, there is no guarantee that such services can restore all your deleted files. If you desperately want to restore deleted data, this is an available option.

Completely Avoid Worrying about Deleted Files | Backup in Advance

Besides accidental file deletion, there are many factors that can cause data loss, such as hard drive failure, ransomware virus affection, system crash, etc. Since these things are unexpected, the best way to protect your data is to perform backups regularly.

You can use free backup software AOMEI Backupper Standard to backup your entire hard drive or some important folders, and then keep creating incremental backups or differential backups as frequently as you like.

AOMEI Backupper comes with a very simple and effective interface and leaves little room for user error. It only needs 5 steps to create a scheduled disk backup task. Please download it to have a try!

Select Disk Backup under the Backup tab, Select the source disk to be backed up and a location to receive the image backup, then specify backup option and frequency. Finally, click Start backup to backup disk in Windows 10.

By default, this software backup only used sectors with Intelligent Sector Backup. If you want to backup disk sector by sector, click Options > Backup Mode > Intelligent Sector and select Make an exact copy.

Besides, you can choose to run scheduled backups at a specific time, daily, weekly, or monthly, upon a certain event or specific device (copy files to USB drive automatically with USB Plug in feature when it's connected). The last two premium feature is available on the professional version.

And it's usually used with incremental backup to backup only changed files. But it's more demanding on recovery. You need to keep one full backup and all the linked incremental backups intact. 

If you mistakenly delete one of the backup images in the middle, the restore process will fail. To prevent this from the beginning, the best way is to use differential backup, it requires only one full backup and any of differential backup.

As time goes by, another problem arises, the backup disk is full. This may be caused by accumulated backups and limited space. To completely resolve this issue, you need to set automatic backup cleanup (By quality, By time, By daily/weekly/monthly), it will delete old backup images regularly. 

And then, if your files are damaged or deleted, you can easily restore files from backup image. Please be sure if the disk has Windows installed on it. If not, you can switch to Restore tab and directly restore entire disk to get data back.

If the disk image contains an operating system, you can choose to mount disk image on your computer and then copy files you want. You need tol use the Explore Image feature. It will mount all the partitions in the disk, assign a drive letter for them and you can see it in the Windows Explorer. 

Summary 

You have 4 ways to restore deleted files from hard drive, but obviously, it is much easier to restore deleted files from an image backup. With AOMEI Backupper schedule backup, you can set it and forget it. When you lose some data or have system issues, you can restore the backup and everything back to normal.