Recover deleted files Video

Recover deleted files Video Transcript

How many times has this happened to you? Jason: "ARRRRRRRGH. Stupid data drive! I just lost my entire collection of Billy Squire songs!" Accidental deletions or disk crashes can cause unparalleled loss. I'm Tom Merritt from CNET.com, and I'll show you how to recover lost data on today's Insider Secret. For this example, I'm going to use a USB drive like this. But the same thing applies to most data drives. If your disk is still readable by the computer, you can recover all kinds of cool stuff. See when you delete data it's not actually wiped off the disk. When a file is written to the disk, its location is noted. So the system knows where to go to read that file--kind of like a book index. Looking here, I can see 'Turn your Mac into a jukebox' is on page nine. When you delete a file, the system removes the entry in the table. The file appears to be gone. This is akin to me blacking out or even tearing out the entry in the book's index. The file itself stays on the machine though. Just like page nine is still in the book. I didn't actually rip it out. But don't forget the computer thinks that location was empty. So if another file was written to that area you may only recover part of a file. Regardless of how your lost file was deleted, if you haven't performed many--if any--operations on the disk, you have a good chance of recovering it. I'm going to use PhotoRec from cgsecurity.org, a free and open-source program in my example. There are a lot of other programs to choose from, such as PC Inspector File Recovery. Let's say I have a few MP3s on this USB drive here. Now I accidentally delete them. Aaah! No worries I launch PhotoRec. My USB thumbdrive should show up. Select it and make sure 'proceed' is highlighted then press 'enter.' Then you need to tell PhotoRec what kind of file system the machine uses. If it's Windows NTFS or FAT32 choose Intel. If you formatted the disk from a Mac choose 'EFI' for Intel Macs and 'Mac' for G4s or older. If the disk has more than one partition, you'll need to choose which one to scan. Otherwise, choose the only partition available and make sure search is selected. Then tell it what file system was used. FAT/NTFs/HFS for Windows and OS X, and EXT for Linux systems. Next, you can tell it to look only at the unused space, which is faster, or if you're obsessive, choose to extract files from the whole partition. Finally tell the program where to store the files. It will suggest a folder based on where PhotoRec is running from. Just don't choose the drive you're scanning as the location. I'm going to press 'Y' and let it do its work. Once it's done, look in the folder you specified earlier. I've got a lot of little pieces of files. But I also have the MP3s I deleted. They're now back on my computer safe and sound. Plus some other crazy stuff from who knows when! Well that's it for this edition of Insider Secrets. I'm Tom Merritt from CNET.com. Enjoy recovery.