Consider this your first aid kit for inadvertently deleted files. If this is what you are here for, our first piece of advice is this: stop using the disk. Whether it's a system disk or an SD card for a camera, the worst thing you can do is to continue writing data to it. This includes data recovery software! If you can't mount the disk from another machine without booting it, then do your best to minimize disk write activity. This includes the use of temporary and cache files, so avoid running resource intensive programs and/or downloading files or browsing the web. Once you've controlled the damage, follow the tips on this website.
Because of their smaller capacity, SD cards, CompactFlash cards and other portable media are often subject to accidental file deletion. Whether you've formatted an entire card or deleted a handful of photos before importing them, your chances for undeleting a photo are fairly high, provided you take the right steps.
When computers won't boot up, it's usually due to a hardware failure or corruption of the partition table, file system or boot record. This is good news because it means that the data that was stored on the disk is usually completely intact. There are a few workarounds that will let you access that data without starting your computer.
What happens when you delete a file or an entire drive? Contrary to what many believe, your data ends up lingering on the disk for far longer than you would imagine. If you are trying to undelete files, that's good news. If you are trying to securely erase your hard drive before recycling or selling your computer, it could be a liability. We'll breakdown the important points to consider in our articles on data erasure and data recovery.
Most cameras, smartphones and other portable devices use Secure Digital (SD) cards or CompactFlash cards for data storage. As with all digital media, data deleted from SD cards can be undeleted using file recovery software. However, there are a number of factors that make recovering data from an SD card or CompactFlash card more difficult. Read on to learn more and find out how to improve your chances for a successful file recovery from a memory card.