A common misunderstanding of file recovery is that it is a kind of voodoo magic that only people initiated into this practice can perform. If you've lost your files, you have to either accept it or pay a large sum to a professional data recovery service. In reality, this is not true. For the most file recovery cases an ordinary computer user may run into, file recovery is simple and easy as 1-2-3. You just need to know how to do that.

This article will show you how to perform those 3 steps to retrieve your lost files. It will give you a general overview and understanding of this process. Then you may read more about some specific file recovery cases in our other articles that may discuss your specific case. You'll find links to them at the end of this article.

Those articles are intended for common computer users and don't require deep knowledge of computer science, but at the same time they'll give you enough information to understand how file recovery works, what results may be expected, and how to perform all necessary actions in various file recovery scenarios.

As an example, we'll use a common file recovery case: several music files and one Adobe pdf document on an external exFAT disk were mistakenly moved to the Recycle Bin, and then the Recycle Bin was emptied. We need to recover them.

We start with 3 preliminary steps.

1. We need to select proper file recovery software. A good choice is R-Undelete Home, a program that combines a very easy-to-use interface with a powerful data recovery engine also used in R-Studio, a reputable professional data recovery program. In addition, it recovers files from FAT/exFAT disks for free, that is, we won't need to buy and register this program to complete the process.
   Note: if our case was lost video/image files, our choice would be R-Photo because it recovers such files from disks with all Windows file systems (FAT, exFAT, NTFS, and ReFS) without any registration. If this is your case, you may move to another article: Free Photo and Video File Recovery Tutorial, and follow its instructions.
2. We need to download and install R-Undelete. If necessary, read Installation/Uninstallation instructions for more detail. And above all: Never install R-Undelete on the disk where the lost files resided or you may lose them for good!
3. We need to prepare enough storage space to save the recovered files. It may be a local disk in the computer, another external USB device, or a network drive. R-Undelete can write files to any storage place visible to the host system.

When all these 3 preliminary steps are completed, we can start actual file recovery in 3 steps, too.

Step 1
Run R-Undelete and locate the disk where the lost files resided.

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We strongly recommend you start any operations with hard disks by checking its hardware health. If it seems that the disk has some hardware issues, stop working with it. Any tampering with a malfunctioning disk may seriously deteriorate its conditions up to its total failure. You may completely lose all your files if that happens.

Signs that a hard disk is failing:

• Your system cannot recognize the disk during startup, or it appears under strange names.
• The disk makes some unusual noise, clicks, and other strange sounds.
• The disk's S.M.A.R.T. attributes show some issues.

If any of these signs appears, go to data recovery professionals, or at least, create an image of the disk and use that image for file recovery. If necessary, read the R-Undelete online help regarding Disk Images to learn how to work with images: Disk Images.

You may use R-Undelete to check a disk's S.M.A.R.T. status by right-clicking the disk and selecting the S.M.A.R.T. option.

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R-Undelete will show disk's S.M.A.R.T. attributes.

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The S.M.A.R.T. status of our disk is OK and we may proceed with file recovery.

By the way, the other disk, ST9320328CS, has the S.M.A.R.T. warning of "Caution". It may work for a while, but it's a good precaution to avoid storing valuable data on this disk.

Step 2
Right-click Disk E: and select Show Files.

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R-Undelete will start enumerating files. When the enumeration is over, R-Undelete will show the found files.

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Now you need to find the lost files. The first step is to select the Deleted only option to see only deleted files.

Then you may use file presorting according to file types and direct search for specific files:

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You may read more about file sorting and search in R-Undelete on-line help: File Sorting and File Search.

If you still cannot find some of your lost files, you may use Deep Scan. During this procedure R-Undelete thoroughly analyses all data on the disk and may find more files. It also enhances estimations of chances for successfully file recovery.

Click the Deep Scan button to start this procedure.

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Then you may estimate chances for successful file recovery. This is especially important when you have to use a paid version of R-Undelete.

R-Undelete shows its estimations in the Recovery chances column. But these are only estimations which could be right or wrong. A much better way is to use a built-in file preview. Double-click the file to preview it.

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If you believe that chances for successful recovery are high, buy the program and register it if necessary (file recovery from NTFS and unrecognized/unsupported file systems). Read the Installation/Uninstallation if necessary.

As we're recovering files from an exFAT disk, we don't need registration.

When you find all lost files, mark them for recovery and click the Recover button.

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Step 3
R-Undelete will start file recovery. When this process is over, the program will show a brief report

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and open the folder with recovered files.

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File recovery is over.

Conclusions:
As our example has shown, file recovery is quite easy and can be performed in most cases by a regular computer user.

You may find more detailed instructions for various file recovery cases in the following articles:

• Get Deleted Files Back
• Free Recovery from SD and Memory cards
• File Recovery from an External Disk with a Damaged, Deleted, Formatted, or Unsupported File System
• File recovery from a non-functional computer
• Free File Recovery from an Android Phone Memory Card

You may also find useful our article on file recovery basics and possible outcome:

• File Recovery Basics
• Predicting Success of Common Data Recovery Cases
• File Recovery Specifics for SSD devices