Data Recovery Tips for Everyday Computer Users

Losing an important file or file folder on your computer can be panic-inducing. Whether it’s that novel you’re working on, a presentation for the board of directors or the history paper that’s due on Monday, when the file fails to open or just isn’t there, the first reaction tends to be a moment of blind panic. Data recovery companies such as Fields Data Recovery deal with panicking people all the time. If you’ve misplaced an important file, accidentally deleted your presentation or can’t find where you downloaded the app you need, these data recovery tips can help you find your files and restore them to their proper place.

Basic Data Recovery Steps

If you’ve gone to open a file on your computer and it’s not there where you expect it, don’t panic. Most “lost files” are easily recoverable. In fact, most lost files are just that – lost. You may have accidentally moved it into another directory when you were performing routine maintenance or clicked “Delete” with your mouse on the wrong file. The moment you notice that an important file has disappeared, follow these instruction:

Do not save or download anything else onto your computer. Close any programs that auto-save information. Whenever your computer saves something to the hard drive, it writes that information to a segment of the disk. When you delete a file, it doesn’t automatically scrub the sector where the data was stored. Instead, it just marks the sectors as writeable – and every time your computer saves something, you risk overwriting the information that’s stored in your file.

Check the Recycle Bin. The most common oh no! moment involving data recovery is the “oops, I didn’t mean to delete that!” error. In most cases, when you delete a file, Windows moves it to the Recycle Bin where it will sit untouched until you empty the Recycle Bin. If your file is there, simply right-click on the file icon and click “Restore File” to put your file back where it belongs.

If your file isn’t in the Recycle Bin, you may have accidentally moved it to a nearby folder. Rather than poking through folder after folder looking for it, use the Windows file search to try to find it. Click on the My Computer icon on your desktop to open My Computer. Type the name of the file into the search box at the top of the window and click “Search”. Windows will search the disk for a file with that name. If you can’t remember the exact name of the file, you can use an advanced search to search by file type, last modified date or other options.

If those two data recovery tricks don’t work, use another computer to download a data recovery program. Install it on the other computer or on a flash drive, then follow the instructions to search the drive for the missing file.

If none of those options work, and the file is very important, you can contact a data recovery company such as Fields Data Recovery, who can often recover up to 98 percent of the data on your drive.