How to Recover Deleted files in Windows and Linux for Free

Deleted your files and photos by accident? then let me show you how to recover them for free. Sometimes you accidentally delete files by pressing Shift+ Delete on the keyboard. You start panicking and try to press undo buttons like Ctrl + Z on the keyword for them to come back from the thin air, but they don’t. You can either sit and regret about it or follow this post to recover them quickly as possible.

First thing first

Do not place any file at the location/folder from where you want to recover your deleted files. If you do that, the chances of recovering the files/photos become pretty low. Unlike it’s predecessor FAT32, NTFS format which we use in the partitions these days, use the immediate free blocks to fill with the incoming data for storage. As a result, blocks where the old deleted files existed are overwritten, erasing traces of files and can only be recovered in special data recovery labs which is an expensive method to pursue.
Recover Deleted files and photos in Windows

There are many paid softwares with trials, but we chose a free tool (freeware) that does the work with efficiency. Download the tool fromHERE and install it on your computer. Do not install in the same drive/partition from where you want to recover files.Run it, a window will appear as give below.

On the left hand top corner of the window, you will see the drives you have. Select the one where you deleted the files, documents or photos of yours.Click on the Scan button given right next the drives browsing menu.It will list the deleted files in an descending chronological order from top to bottom by default. You can sort it the list by size, date of modification(deletion), alphabetically.Tick the box next to the names of the files you want to recover. It will show in recoverability column whether Good, Bad, Lost meaning whether they can be recovered with ease, can cause difficulties and cannot be recovered. You can search the list of deleted files found, even on the basis of images, videos, audio files, compressed data, documents, etc.

When are you done selecting the files, click on the Recover button given on the right bottom corner of the window. It will turn green after you have selected at least one deleted file to recover. When you click on the Recover  button, a dialogue box appears for selecting a place to store these recovered files. Recover deleted files and they will be available in the folder/drive where you wanted them to be.

Note – You won’t be able to recover the files by this method if the files are not permanently deleted and can be found in Recycle Bin. They can restored from the bin and can be found back in the folder/drive where they previously existed.

Now you have successfully recovered deleted files on Windows. If you want to recover deleted files in Linux then you can try this freeware tool called PhotoRec. It is Terminal based, but is quite effective and easy to use with the instructions.

If you have any trouble in recovering deleted files on Windows or Linux then feel free to ask for help by commenting below.