One thing to know first
Stop writing to it. Beyond that, this is often yours to fix for free.
Deleting a file removes its entry from the index and marks the space it occupied as reusable. The content stays exactly where it was until something else is written over it. That means the clock is measured in writes rather than in hours: a device left alone holds its deleted files more or less indefinitely, while one still in daily use can lose them within minutes. Stop using the device, and the odds stay where they are.
Often fixable yourself
Deleted files from desktop hard drive
A desktop hard drive in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
The deletion itself removed an index entry and freed the space; your file content is still on the platters. The complication on an internal drive is that the computer never stops writing to it. Temporary files, browser caches, logs, updates and search indexing all write continuously into free space, and free space now includes the area your deleted files occupy. The passage of time is not the enemy here. Continued use of the machine is.
A bare SATA drive from a desktop. No enclosure to fail means a fault here is usually the drive itself rather than the thing it was plugged into.
Ordinary deletionbetter news
The index entry is gone, the content remains. This is the standard case and it recovers well.
Emptied from the recycle bin or trashbetter news
Exactly the same situation. The bin was only ever an index entry too.
Deleted from a phone or camerabetter news
Frequently recoverable from the card. On a modern phone, check the app's own recently-deleted album first, and most keep deleted items for thirty days.
Deleted on an SSD with TRIM
The drive is told it may discard the blocks, and often does so within minutes. This case is genuinely unrecoverable, by anyone.
What to check first on a desktop hard drive
- Check the recycle bin first, and check any backup or version history you may have forgotten you had.
- If the files matter, stop using the computer. Not close the program, shut it down.
- Recover the drive as a secondary disk from another machine, or from external media, so the operating system on it is not running.
What not to do
Do not download and install recovery software onto the same drive you are recovering from. The installer writes into free space, which is precisely where your deleted files are sitting, and people regularly overwrite the file they were trying to save with the tool they downloaded to save it.
Try this before you pay anyone
Check the free options in this order before paying anyone anything
- Look in the recycle bin or trash first, then in the application's own recently-deleted folder. Photos apps, mail clients and most cloud tools keep deleted items for around thirty days, and this alone resolves a great many cases in under a minute.
- Check whether the file is in a backup or a synced cloud copy: File History or a Time Machine snapshot, or version history in OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud. Version history survives a deletion that syncing propagated everywhere else.
- If none of those, stop using the device before running anything. Then recover with Recuva, PhotoRec, or Microsoft's free Windows File Recovery, always writing the recovered files to a different drive.
- For a memory card, take the card out of the camera and read it through a card reader rather than letting the camera or phone touch it again.
If the deleted file was on an SSD with TRIM enabled, it is very likely gone at the flash level within minutes and no tool or lab will bring it back. That is worth accepting early rather than paying to discover. On a mechanical drive there is no such mechanism, and the file waits until something overwrites it.
How recoverable this is
Frequently excellent on mechanical drives and memory cards, especially where the device was taken out of use quickly. This is the single most self-recoverable case on the site and most readers should not be paying anyone for it. The exception is an SSD with TRIM, where deletion is effectively immediate and permanent regardless of who is asked.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How much has been written to the device since the deletion
- Whether the filesystem journal still holds the original entries
- Whether the files were large and contiguous, or small and scattered
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
Deleted, formatted or corrupt (drive healthy)
Files deleted, a drive reformatted, a partition lost, a filesystem that won't mount. The media itself is fine; the map to the data isn't.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on a desktop hard drive
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.