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It can be very easy to delete or lose a file by accident. This article goes through a simple lost file recovery approach to find your documents whether they have been deleted, formatted or corrupted.

You can start by checking the recycle bin for your lost file. Each partition has its own bin so be sure to look in the right one. If present, you can simply restore files back to their last folder location.

If the bin is empty or the drive was formatted then data recovery software is necessary to complete lost file recovery. These tools work because deleting a file only clears the files index the partition’s file allocation table but leaves the data clusters alone (a document is stored to disk as several data clusters).

Download and install recovery software. For hard drive/flash drive recovery then you have plenty of free options (e.g. Recuva or PhotoRec) to pick from. Once started, you pick a drive to scan and the application will read the disk for deleted document. In fact, it reads the file allocation table and scans the drive for data clusters. A list of found files are returned and you simple copy the ones to retrieve.

Formatting a drive is often used for fixing computers by reinstalling Windows, but even in this scenario some lost files will be found by the software.

Your level of success with the software will depend on a few factors. The quicker you scan for the files the better, as deleted/formatted clusters will eventually be overwritten by newly saved files. Advanced formatters that do a data cleaning sweep of the disk will attempt to overwrite data clusters with blank/random data which will probably clear the original data almost entirely.

Lost file recovery is not that difficult to do using software. Think about augmenting your PC maintenance with data backups to protect you in future from the risk of losing files.

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