How to Recover/Undelete Accidentally Deleted Files With NTFS Undelete

Submitted by whiztech on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 02:29

Do you ever faced a situation where you accidently deleted your documents or music files? Stay calm and don't panic! You can actually recover the deleted data as long as the data is not overwritten. The sooner you try to recover the deleted data, the chance for the recovery to be successful is high. When a file is deleted, the content of the file is physically remains intact on the storage, but the occupied space will be marked as free. Next file saved to the disk may overwrite the contents of the deleted file. When you are tying to recover/undelete a deleted file, it is very important to make sure that no application writes to the drive or partition where deleted file is located since every new file (even a small one) may overwrite the deleted file.

In this post, I will show you how to recover/undelete deleted files with NTFS Undelete. NTFS Undelete is free and open source software that allows you to recover deleted files. It recovers files directly from hard drive, and it will work even if you empty Recycle Bin. The interface of NTFS Undelete is very clean, simple and easy to use.

In this post, I will try to recover a 1.36GB avi video file with MD5 file hash value of 433D8874F02D09FB110233EC725B900F (to check if the recovered file is 100% same as the deleted file). The partition that contained the deleted file is quite fragmented. The file is deleted without moving it to the recycle bin (Shift+Delete).

First of all, you need to download NTFS Undelete. I recommend you to download the portable version (ZIP archive). Make sure to save the downloaded file and extract NTFS Undelete to the drive other than drive that contains the file that you want to recover. To be save, save and extract it to external drive such as USB flash drive. This will prevent the file that you want to recover from being overwritten with new data.
Next, run NTFS Undelete (NTFSUndelete.exe). Using NTFS Undelete, browse to the directory where the deleted file is stored (1). A deleted file will be marked with X (2) on its icon. If you are browsing a drive with a lot of files, NTFS Undelete will take some time to search and build the list of deleted files (3). If the deleted file is listed in NTFS Undelete, then you are lucky. Simply select the deleted file that you want to recover (4).
Next, click the 'Recover marked files' (5) tab. Select the directory that you want to store the recovered file (6) (make sure to choose a folder NOT from the drive that contain the file that you want to recover!). You can leave other options to its default value. Click 'Recover' (7) to begin the recovery process.
NTFS Undelete also support the ability to search the deleted file. The advanced options allows you to filter your search result according to various input method.
In my test, I've successfully recovered the test file, and the MD5 value remains the same!

I highly recommend you keep a copy of NTFS Undelete on your system in case you've accidently deleted your important files. NTFS Undelete is available for Windows. NTFS Undelete is free and open source.

[Download: NTFS Undelete]