Don’t risk it with an inferior recovery application.

Use a reliable recovery tool: You might only get one chance to recover your lost data.

Pick a safe installation location: If the file deletion occurs on your main hard drive, you should download, install, and run hard disk recovery software on a USB drive to avoid overwriting the deleted data.

Until the OS reuses this space, the deleted data can be restored with file recovery software. It simply marks the space occupied by the item as available for future use by the system. When the Windows operating system deletes a file or folder, it does not physically remove it from your hard drive.

Stop using the hard drive: As soon as you realize that data loss has occurred, you should stop using the hard drive.

For example, Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery can help you protect important files against data loss, while Data Shredder can be used to permanently delete sensitive files. When you’re done recovering data, you can explore the multiple extra free disk tools that are included with Disk Drill.

All images were discovered during the initial Quick Scan, so their recovery didn’t take much time at all.

During our testing, Disk Drill successfully recovered all 100 test images, which included JPG, PNG, and TIFF files. It then presents the discovered files for review, allowing you to preview them in order to verify their recoverability. Disk Drill can recover over 400 file formats from all commonly used Windows, macOS, and Linux files systems, including NTFS, FAT, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, HFS, HFS+, and APFS. Disk Drill will automatically run all recovery methods in the optimal order to discover as many lost files as possible. You simply need to install the software on your computer, select your hard drive, and begin the recovery process with a single click. There’s a good reason why Disk Drill occupies the top spot in this ranking of hard drive recovery software, and that reason is its one-click approach to data recovery.

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