Readers Questions.
IF01748
Q.
I was cleaning out my computer the other day and everything was sent to the
Recycle Bin. I realized later that I had gotten rid of a couple files I needed
to save. Is there any way I can get them back if it's only been a couple days?
Please help me, I'm desperate!
A.
I'm sure you're not the only one who has done this either, so with you asking
this question, we'll be helping out a lot of people today.
First, I
want to say that it's great that you were
cleaning out your computer. It's a
good idea to keep up with that, because it gives you extra space. Plus, there's
really no good reason to keep old files, etc. on your PC. I also want to tell
you that it's fine that everything was put into the Recycle Bin. By default,
it's just what your computer does whenever you choose that Delete option. Now,
if you haven't emptied your Recycle Bin yet, you're in good shape. And if you
have, don't worry, I have a suggestion for that too.
Alright,
for those of you who have not yet emptied your Recycle Bin, follow these
directions. Go to your desktop and double click on your
Recycle Bin icon.
Once you do that, you'll be able to see all of the files you've recently
deleted. From here, there's a few things you can do. The easiest is to highlight
the file you want to save, right click it and choose Restore. That will
restore the file and send it back to its original location. You can do this for
as many files as you wish to "bring back to life."
Another
option is to highlight the file you want to save, right click it and choose
Cut. You can then navigate to the location you'd like to put it in, right
click again and choose
Paste. That will put the file back in another spot
on your computer for you. The third option is to drag the file you want to
restore and drop it where you'd like to save it. All of these methods give you
the same result, but like I said before, the first one is probably the easiest.
If you
already had several files in your
Recycle Bin before you did your most recent
cleaning, the new ones may have taken over the older ones. So, if there was an
older file you wanted to save, it may be gone. It's always important to take a
look back over all the files you've deleted before you put new ones in or empty
the bin. That way, you'll know for sure what you're getting rid of and you won't
have to go through the panic of realizing you deleted a wrong one.
Now, for
those of you who have already emptied your Recycle Bin, you'll probably have to
look into getting some software to recover the lost files. I would only do this
if the file is very important to you or if there's no other way you can get
another copy of it. One of the best ones I've come across is called
PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 4, but there are
several titles out there. Just do a search with your favorite search engine and
you should be able to find something that will help you get your files back.
Let me know if you need anything else.
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