Storage drives do not last forever because consecutive read and write accesses limit their lifetime. In addition to physical problems, you need to add other potential problems such as serious operating system malfunctions or malware infections. And finally, we have the accidental deletion, from which no one is safe.

In these cases and if we have not created adequate backup copies (as we strongly recommend) our digital lives can be turned upside down by the loss of professional or personal data. Fortunately, if there is no critical physical error preventing any access to the drive, there are opportunities to recover these files.

It must be said that in most cases the errors are not fatal. Files can “disappear” because they haven’t been formatted, there’s a problem with the file structure (which is quite common on Windows systems), they’ve been improperly ejected from the drive, or they’ve been accidentally deleted, but they’re still on the drive. It is worth investing time in restoring them. We’ll tell you how.

Do not use the disc to restore

If there’s one piece of advice to follow for this task, it’s this stop using the unit immediately when we detect accidental deletion of files or any type of failure. It is a critical aspect to have a better chance of recovery, as overwriting in storage drive spaces where files have been deleted is the main reason why we can’t software restore them.

Another recommendation that follows on from the previous one is to remove the storage unit from the failed device and try data recovery on another computer external like a PC. If it’s a hard drive or SSD, we’d mount it in the free slots as a secondary drive, and the same if it’s a microSD that failed in a smartphone or USB flash drive or external drive.

There are applications that work directly on the disk that has errors, but the recovery results are usually not as good. In short and to begin with, stop using the unit and remove it the device or devices where the errors occurred.

free software

The industry offers a wide collection of commercial data recovery applications. There are also free tools that offer good results on all types of disks, as long as the data is not overwritten and there are no global physical disturbances that would definitely prevent us from recovering it.

Between free solutions for file recovery on Windows systems (some for Linux and open source) we have selected these ten:

• Piriform Recuva
• ZAR X
• Data recovery software
• Wondershare Data Recovery
• Disc drill
• apowersoft
• TestDisk
• PC Inspector file recovery
• Puran File Recovery
• Smart data recovery

How to recover deleted files

All these software solutions work in the same way. They are simply downloaded, installed and run. They will perform a previous scan of the storage drive and display the status of deleted files which could be restored in simple interfaces to understand and process.

From there, we just mark the files we are interested in and the application will perform the recovery process. As we mentioned above, file recovery should always be done on a second computer for more opportunities.

Depending on the storage drive you want to analyze and restore the process may take a long time. Be patient. There are no miracles, and sometimes it is already impossible, but if the errors were not caused by a physical failure and you did not overwrite, you will be able to recover deleted files from any storage drive.

Once we have verified that we have managed to save the data to another drive, we can now format it, insert it into the original computer, copy the saved data and continue to use it in the usual way. And without forgetting backup tasks, mandatory in the world we live in because data loss is a daily occurrence.