So you deleted a file a few days back from your computer, and now you realized the significance of it. You have already started kicking yourself thinking how careless one can be with such an important document. This is a situation that a lot of people would find familiarity with. Well, it is not at all difficult to restore the deleted file from the recycle bin, but the situation is likely to get more complicated if you check the recycle bin and find it totally empty. This is where the shock invokes! It happens to the best of us, and fortunately there are some ways you can try to get these lost files back.

Usually when we talk about data recovery or recovery of a particular file, we’re actually talking about the steps to restore data from a hard drive. Here are the steps that you may follow, in the situation when you wish to restore the data from your recycle bin and also when you don’t actually find it in the recycle bin. Let’s take a brief look at both the situations individually.

Restoring File From The Recycle Bin

When you accidentally delete a file from your computer without pressing shift+delete, it actually just moves to the Recycle Bin. It is a temporary storage for files that are not used anymore by the user. The files here are temporarily stored until the Recycle Bin is emptied. This feature or application gives you the opportunity to recover files that could have got accidentally deleted while you were deleting the other ones. To recover files from the Recycle Bin, follow the following steps:

• Click on the Recycle Bin icon.
• Open the file by double-clicking at the icon on your desktop.
• Now click on the file you wish to restore.
• Click on the “Restore item” given on the toolbar on left corner of the window.
• Alternatively, you can also restore the file by selecting the file and clicking the right button on your mouse. Select the option restore and you are done!

With the help of this process, your file will be restored to the original location on your computer.

Restoring The File Deleted Permanently With Shift+Del

So by mistake you emptied your recycle bin and suddenly realized that you’ve deleted a file that you might still need. The only trick to recover a permanently deleted file is to act fast and immediately stop working on your computer. This is to make sure that the computer doesn’t overwrite any other program or work on the hard drive before the file is restored.

In simple words, when a file is deleted from your computer, the content is not immediately destroyed. Initially, Windows marks the recently vacated hard drive space as available for use, which usually changes just one character of the content. If you manage to stop all the programs running on your computer immediately before Windows overwrites the vacated part with new files, you can easily recover the file. The whole idea is to stop using the current disk and keep it unchanged. Also, there are some free recovery software like Panda Recovery, Undelete Plus etc, that can help you recover permanently deleted files.

However, if none of the methods work in your case, it is highly advised to contact data recovery specialists.