How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

Most of us have accidentally deleted a photo from your camera, on your computer, USB flash drive, or on other external drive at one point or another. Windows provides the Recycle Bin that holds deleted files for a while allowing you to recover files. However, how do you recover files deleted from your camera, USB flash drive, memory cards, or other external drive? The following article shows you a couple of tools you can use to recover deleted files from drives other than your computer’s How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally hard drive.

How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera’s memory stick.

Windows tries to prevent you from making a big mistake by providing the Recycle Bin, where deleted files hang around for a while—but unfortunately it doesn’t work for external USB drives, USB flash drives, memory sticks, or mapped drives. Luckily there’s another way to recover deleted files.

Restore that File or Photo using Recuva

The first piece of software that you’ll want to try is called Recuva, and it’s extremely easy to use—just make sure when you are installing it, that you don’t accidentally install that stupid Yahoo! toolbar that nobody wants.

Now that you’ve installed the software, and avoided an awful toolbar installation, launch the Recuva wizard and let’s start through the process of recovering those pictures you shouldn’t have deleted.

The first step on the wizard page will let you tell Recuva to only search for a specific type of file, which can save a lot of time while searching, and make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Next you’ll need to specify where the file was, which will obviously be up to wherever you deleted it from. Since I deleted mine from my camera’s SD card, that’s where I’m looking for it.

The next page will ask you whether you want to do a Deep Scan. My recommendation is to not select this for the first scan, because usually the quick scan can find it. You can always go back and run a deep scan a second time.

And now, you’ll see all of the pictures deleted from your drive, memory stick, SD card, or wherever you searched.

If there are a really large number of results, and you know exactly when the file was created or modified, you can switch to the advanced view, where you can sort by the last modified time. This can help speed up the process quite a bit, so you don’t have to look through quite as many files.

At this point, you can right-click on any filename, and choose to Recover it, and then save the files elsewhere on your drive.

 See the table below for feature options Free or Paid versions with Link to the Manufacturer: