Help for Accidentally Deleted Files

Find out how to recover a file that has been accidentally deleted in Windows with Undelete’s Emergency Undelete

“It’s that singularity moment that you feel the hairs on the back of your next stand up, you have that cold sweat, that knotted butterflies in the stomach feeling, that point when you suddenly realize ‘Oh no, I’ve just deleted those files and I needed them.’ I’m going to use the Undelete software to show you how easy it is to recover these files,” Spencer Allingham, Engineer

Featuring:

Spencer Allingham, Engineer

Description:

This video is the 6th in a series of 7 videos by a top Condusiv engineer that each demonstrate different technical features and benefits of the software. In this video, our engineer covers how to recover accidentally deleted files in Windows, with the Undelete software from Condusiv Technologies that makes it very quick and easy.

[transcript]

00:00 Spencer: Hello, there. I’d like to show you how to Undelete accidentally deleted files in Windows. So to demonstrate this, I have a USB stick, and on here are a number of photo files. So let me just plug this in and we’ll take a look. There we go. So this is mounted as my G drive. There’s a number of photos on here. It could be nice holiday snaps, photos of my family. They could also be important work documents, but they’re here on this USB drive. And these are important files to me. The last thing I would want is to have them delete it, especially if they’re not backed up somewhere, which hopefully wouldn’t be the case these days. But guess what? It still happens. So watch what happens when I delete them from a USB stick. Look at this message. “Are you sure that you want to permanently delete these five items?” Permanently delete, this means that if I would… And yes, they wouldn’t go into the Windows recycle bin. If they’re not backed up anywhere, not easy to recover. So the last thing I would want to do with these important files is go anywhere near this Yes button and accidentally click… Oh, oops, I’ve just deleted them.

01:39 Spencer: And that, my friends, is the point in which most people find our Undelete software for the first time. It’s that single point of extreme cognition, that singularity moment when you suddenly feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You have that cold sweat, the knotted butterflies in the stomach feeling, that point when you suddenly realize, “Oh no, I’ve just deleted those files and I needed them. And they’re nowhere else. I can’t get them.” So you do what most people do, and you turn to the Internet and either try and find a file recovery company, which can be expensive, or you look for a utility that will do it for you, like the Undelete software from Condusiv. So I’m going to use the Condusiv Undelete software to show you how easy it is actually to recover those files.

02:38 Spencer: Now, before I do that, it’s important to understand why we can recover those accidentally deleted files. And to understand that, let’s think about the way that Windows actually goes about the process of deletion. So on a disk volume, whether it’s your C drive, D drive, in this case, a G drive, a mounted disk volume, when you delete a file like that, Windows doesn’t actually overwrite the file data straight away. What happens is you have a directory structure on each volume, which… Think of it a bit like the telephone book, if you like, a big list of addresses of where to go to on that volume to find the various file data, whether it be the contents or other file metadata. So when you delete something, it doesn’t just overwrite the files. What happens is the pointers that point to the addresses on the volume where that file data is, they get removed from the directory. And the spaces on the volume where the file is gets marked as unallocated or usable, and they’re now available to be overwritten. But as long as that hasn’t happened yet, and that file data hasn’t actually been overwritten, you can recover them. You can recover that data.

04:06 Spencer: So that’s one of the things that the Condusiv Undelete software does. It allows you to search through the free space on a volume, looking for those files that haven’t been overwritten yet and can be recovered. So let’s go ahead and open up our Recovery Bin from the Undelete software. And what we want to use here is in the Tools, in the ribbon, in the Tools tab. And you’ll find this little search function here. So let’s go ahead and click that and then we say, yes, we want to search our G drive. That’s where the files were deleted from. And then if we hit the Search button, it will do that search through what Windows sees as free space, looking for those files to recover, and here they are.

04:53 Spencer: So we want to recover these. We want to keep them safe and learn our lesson and back them up properly. [chuckle] So we’ll hit the Undelete Files button to recover them. Now, this is interesting. It’s saying “Select the location where you want the restored files to go.” Now ideally, you want to copy them on to another disk. So in this case, it’s suggesting a folder on my C drive. Why don’t you want to restore it to the original folder? Well, you might accidentally overwrite some of the data that you are actually trying to recover before it’s all fully recovered. So it makes sense to just read the deleted files from that USB stick and save them somewhere else, so you’ve got the maximum chance of recovering the most amount of data.

05:45 Spencer: So we’ll go ahead and put them in this path on my C drive. So let’s go ahead and do that. And yeah, each one was undeleted successfully to that folder. So now, I can close Undelete, and we should, fingers crossed, have the recovered files in that folder. Let’s go ahead and see. There they are. They’ve been recovered. So now, if I want to, I can put a copy back onto the G drive it. Let’s do that.

06:19 Spencer: Phew. Crisis averted. So I hope that helps. It is really that quick and easy to Undelete accidentally deleted files even before you’ve installed the Undelete software. And actually, so those of you who have already installed the Undelete software, you might remember that during the installation procedure, before you actually installed the software, it asks you a question, an important one, which is, “Are you trying to recover a lost file right now?” And if the answer to that is yes, it doesn’t actually install the full Undelete software. What it does is it executes without installing anything or writing anything anywhere, the Emergency Undelete software, which is basically this search functionality to search through the free space on a volume to recover that data. Because otherwise, if you were to install the full software before you’d recover that data that you needed to get back, just the process of installing it might accidentally overwrite the files, which is the last thing you want.

07:27 Spencer: So yeah, it has a bit of intelligence there so that if you’re doing it because it’s an emergency and you’ve got hold of the software to try and dig yourself out of the trouble that you’re in, it will try and have your back and make sure that as much of that data is recoverable as possible.

07:47 Spencer: So for those of you who have found this video because you are in that unfortunate position, you can go ahead and purchase the full Undelete software. But here’s a helpful hint, you can also get the 30-day trialware of the software completely free right now from our website. So let me show you how to do that. Bring up a browser, go to condusiv.com. That’s C-O-N-D-U-S-I-V. And then if you go into the Download section and have a look in the Evaluation Software, you’ll see in there, you’ve got Request Undelete Evaluation Software. There’s a little registration form to fill out. As soon as you submit that, you will get your free download link and that will allow the Undelete software to run fully featured for 30 days so that you have a good try of it and see if it’s something that you might want to purchase further down the road. But it also includes that ability to emergency Undelete without installing or writing over anything.

08:57 Spencer: So I really hope that helps. Yeah, let me know. If this has helped you out, please put a comment below. Let us know because we love to get customer feedback. Even if you didn’t go on to buy the software, just let me know that even that trialware helped you out. I’d love to hear that. So hopefully it has. If you have any questions or want any assistance from one of our engineers, feel free to get in touch and let us know. Again, on the website, there is a contact page here, and this has all of the contact details you need for your specific region. So you’ve got North America here with phone numbers, my region, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. You’ve got details for Australia, Japan, Latin America, and there’s an email address even for China. Reach out to us. Let us know. We’re here to help. We have some very good engineers, not just me. [chuckle] No, there are some very good engineers that have a lot of experience with using this Undelete software and helping customers out. So please feel free, get in touch, let us know. We will always do what we can to help you out. Well, thank you for listening, I hope it’s been helpful. And take care, everyone.

Use Undelete’s Emergency Undelete feature to retrieve accidentally deleted files.