Recovering deleted files

During scanning, Easy-Undelete 3.0 calculates the chances of successfully recovering a file according to the amount of clusters from the original files that were overwritten by new files. If none of the clusters were overwritten, the file condition is marked as Good; if some clusters were overwritten, the file condition is marked as Poor. If an error was encountered reading a file record, the file condition is marked Unrecoverable.

However, even if the file condition is displayed as Good, there is no guarantee that the recovered file would contain the original data. For more information about possible pitfalls in recovering deleted files, see <Viewing the contents of deleted files>.

To recover deleted files or folders:

1. Select one or more files or folders in the right pane.

2. Click the (Undelete) button on the the toolbar, or select Undelete… from the File menu or from the context-menu.

3. Select the destination folder to place the recovered files in. To minimize risk of data loss, and prevent the newly created files from overwriting the data you are trying to recover, make sure you select a destination folder on a different physical device, or at the very least on a different volume. If you select a destination on the same volume, a confirmation dialog will appear.

   If you want to create a new folder to place the recovered files or folders in, navigate to the place where you want to create it, click on Make New Folder, and type a name for it.

4. Click on OK to recover the files or folders to the selected location.

To recover files by cluster, see <Viewing the contents of deleted files>

Notes:

• very small files (usually below 1 kilobyte) are often kept entirely in the file system records. These files can be almost always be recovered successfully.

• Even if a cluster is marked as unused, it could have already been used and freed since the original file was deleted. Therefore, even if the file condition is displayed as Good, there is no guarantee that the recovered file would actually contain the original data.

• On FAT volumes, the original cluster list cannot be reconstructed, and Easy-Undelete 3.0 must assume that deleted files were stored in consecutive clusters - even if this wasn't the case. Non-contiguous (fragmented) files on FAT volumes can't be successfully recovered.