Have you ever said that? I know I have, there are a lot of people way smarter than I am and by the time you finish reading this, I think you will see what I’m talking about.
My buddy Wayne, aka HowlerGeek e-mailed me last night and the e-mail went something like this:
Someone really close to me *may* have deleted all of the pictures she took at camp last week from her laptop.
Do you have any recommendations for an “undelete” utility for WinXP Home?
First of all, let’s address the obvious question, once a file has been deleted from your hard drive, it’s gone, right? Well, not exactly. When you delete a file, all Windows does is change the first character of the file, which essentially designates the space where that file sits as available to overwrite. So the data is still on the hard drive until it is overwritten. However, there is software available that will identify these files occupying space ready to be overwritten and enable you to recover it.
Offhand, I didn’t know specifically of any software that would do this, but I went to ‘The Google‘ and snooped around and really found nothing substantial. So, I thought, why not post it out here because I know the combined knowledge of all my readers is way more than the knowledge that I have on my own.
I really appreciate all comments and e-mails, I really do, but a couple were very specific and seemed legit.
- PC Inspector – Tim suggested this site, where they offer 2 freeware applications, FileRecovery and SmartRecovery. FileRecovery will find all deleted files in the free space of your hard drive, display them to you and allow you to choose what to recover.
- RecoverMyFiles – Steven suggested this application, which finds all of the deleted files in the free space of your hard drive and allows you to preview the deleted files for free. Then, if you see what you are looking for, you can pay $69.95 and be able to choose what you want to recover. Before running the software, you can choose which drives and folders to search, so you can either search everything or only folders and drives that you specify and it also allows you to search for specific file types, such as *.jpg, *.bmp, *.doc, *.etc.
Just for fun, I ran RecoverMyFiles on my C: drive and it identified 19,518,974 sectors of free space that it had to search and found 16,110 files. Wow. I had no idea. I know there’s way more files still on my hard drive and I had no idea I had deleted that many. I was able to see pictures, documents and everything. This includes every graphic and photo from every website you have been to, such as Twitter profile pics, etc.
I didn’t run PC Inspector but if I had to actually recover files, I might try that first, since it performs the job for free, but RecoverMyFiles will recover everything possible, that hasn’t been over-written, for a small price, and that is probably worth the price.
I would install these on a jump drive and run them from there because it’s possible that you could overwrite the specific file with this software that you are trying to recover! I have these 3 applications on my jump drive now, in my CoreUtilities. (Sometime in the near future, I will share what utilities I consider ‘must haves’ for anyone who is ever asked ‘Can you look at my PC, it’s …)
For the record, I am not endorsing nor am I being compensated for anything in this post, I’m simply transferring knowledge.