All laptops have a hard drive which acts as the basic storage device for the laptops. Flash sticks, memory cards and external hard drives are used as removable storage devices to help carry data from one place to the other.
A program or any other users can accidentally delete data from your device. You can also lose data when the drives are formatted, or a partition becomes damaged. Some viruses also delete data. Here are few tips to recovering your information if t deleted in any of these cases.
Restore from the backup
It is a good practice to back up information in a location different from your computer. In case data is lost in one of the devices, you can always restore it from the other device. It saves you possible total loss and time spent recovering data when lost.
Check for the deleted files in the recycle bin
Small files deleted from the internal hard disk of your computer are stored temporarily in the recycle bin just in case you wanted to restore them again. This feature is not available in the removable storage devices.
Open the recycle bin and check for your files. Click on each of the files and select the option that indicates ‘restore’. The files will go back to the location that they were when you were deleting them.
If you cannot find the deleted files in the recycle bin, you probably deleted them for good. In order to increase your chances of recovering the data, do not save any more files on the hard drive. If you do, the data overwrites on the available space which will make it hard to recover any lost data.
Use of recovery programs
There are a number of free and paid data recovery programs available on the internet. There also a variety of others that offer a trial but you must buy it for deeper searches. Some of the free programs include Recuva and Recover My Files. The effective paid software programs include EaseUs USB Flash Drive Data Recovery, Card Recovery and Data Recovery Doctor Pen Drive among others.
If neither of the data recovery tools can recover your data, the hard drive or removable devices may be too damaged. Such devices require professional data recovery service. However, in most cases, much of the data will be recovered by the methods above.
