Solutions to Recover Lost Files on Windows 10

There is no doubt that many people have encountered data loss issue when using Windows.  Today, human mistake is a major reason for data loss in general. And actually, human errors bring about more data loss than hardware errors and viruses.

Unexpected deletion, as a major part of human error, occurs owing to human unintentional mistakes when they operate computers. Evidently, it happens to users frequently and leads to various data loss situations.

Noticing this, I intend to conclude a tutorial of detailed steps to recover lost files on Windows 10 with a technical data recovery application. Therefore, in this post, we are going to show you how to perform lost data recovery, such as documents, photos, videos and music, etc.

How A File Is Deleted on Windows 10?

Generally speaking, you may take two ways to delete data in Windows: Delete, right-click on a file and click Delete, Shift + Delete. The previous two kinds of deletion can just delete the file or folder temporarily with the deleted data going straight to the Recycle Bin, from which you can restore it within just a few clicks.

However, if you have chosen Shift + Delete to delete a file or emptied the Recycle Bin, you may need a data recovery tool to rescue if there is no backup prepared, because you can find the deleted file nowhere in computer.

Note: As the system will mark the original space of the deleted files as available to use, newly generated files may occupy this space. So, you’d better not save any new items to the hard drive (where the files are deleted) to avoid the deleted files being overwritten. Otherwise, the deleted files may become unrecoverable.

In order to help you recover lost files on Windows effectively, we are going to show you a detailed process of how to do it.

How Can You Recover Lost Files on Windows 10

Don’t have knowledge in Windows computer? Never have experience in lost file recovery? Don’t worry. MiniTool Power Data Recovery, as a professional data recovery application, is able to help you solve the problem of data loss from not only local hard drive, but also external hard drive.  

Before carrying out the recovery, you need to check whether the deleted files can be found in Recycle Bin or not. If yes, take seconds to restore them:

Open Recycle Bin to see the deleted files are place there.

② If the needed files are there, right click and choose Restore to recover them to the original path.

Except for this situation, you are suggested to download and install MiniTool Power Data Recovery for help. Then, please read the following paragraphs to acquire the detailed steps to recover lost files on Windows 10 with this software.

Step 1: Run MiniTool Power Data Recovery to the main software interface. On the panel, 4 recovery modules are listed: This PC, Removable Disk Drive, Hard Disk Drive, and CD/DVD Drive. We choose This PC as an example.

Step 2: Select the drive (from which you deleted files) and click Scan to scan it. The scanning will last for a while depending on the used volume of the drive. The larger the used volume is, the loner time the process will take.

Step 3: When the scanning process finishes, you can check the scanning results to find the needed files. Filter, Show Lost Files and Find features are helpful to locate the needed files quicker.

Step 4: Tick on all needed files. Click Save to select a location (different from the original drive) to save the recovered files. After that, the recovered files can be found in the specified path.

This is whole process of how to recover lost files on Windows 10 by using MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Besides the deleted files, you can also restore lost data from lost/damaged/RAW partition.

Useful Tips

In the end, we list a few critical ways that may help you protect data against potential data loss situations:

  • Make a backup for stored data, especially the valuable files.
  • Install antivirus software to prevent virus from invading computer.

Take care when operating data to avoid deleting some important data mistakenly.

Author
I work in MiniTool® Software Ltd. as an editor. We provide customers with complete business software solutions in the data recovery, partition management and data backup&restore industry.