Just when you’ve emptied your recycle bin you realize that you actually needed those files that you just deleted.  So now you want to know how to recover deleted files? This is the most important piece of advice that anyone can give you.  If you want to increase your chances of recovering your deleted files, immediately stop using your computer, thumb drive, or other media storage device that you had your files on. 

If you were using a USB thumb drive, disconnect it right away and don’t save anything else onto it.  If you’re on a Windows machine, before you unplug it, make sure you do it the safe way by clicking on the “safely remove hardware” option and stopping the device first.  Don’t just pull it out – USB ports have current flowing through them and just pulling out your USB drive can damage it or corrupt your data. 

If the file was on your computer’s hard drive, try to stop using your computer.  This may be hard to do if you only have one computer and need to use it, but it is vital to recovery that you stop using it right away. 

So why should you stop using your computer and/or thumb drives?  When you delete a file, the space that the file once occupied is now freely available for other files to use.  So if you start loading up programs, doing anything on your computer, or saving files to your hard drive or USB drive, then you could possibly be overwriting the space where your deleted files were.  The more you use your drive, the worse your file recovery chances get.  If you don’t want your files to be overwritten, stop using the hard drive, thumb drive, or whatever other device you had your files on. 

I hope you’ve realized the importance of not using your devices that had the deleted files.  If you’re currently using your hard drive, USB drive, or other device that the files were deleted from, please do yourself a big favor and refrain from using it at all until you can get yourself some file recovery software to recover the deleted data. 

Stay tuned for more tips on how to recover deleted files!