How to Recover Deleted Files from Recycle Bin

Like most other desktop operating systems, Windows comes with its own version of file deletion mechanics. Also known as the trash, the Recycle Bin is a temporary storage for deleted files and folders. From the practical point-of-view, it works just like the garbage bin in your office or room. Until you get rid of the content of the recycle bin, you can easily restore deleted files and folders from if back to their original locations. Once you empty it, however, recovering your data becomes much more difficult and requires a special data recovery software solution such as Disk Drill for Windows.

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How to Recover Files from Recycle Bin

The temporary folder for deleted files in Windows is also called Recycle Bin, and it’s represented by either an empty or full trash can icon. Whether the icon shows an empty trash can or a full trash can depend on if there are any files in the recycle bin. It doesn’t matter how many — even a single file is enough to cause Windows to display the full icon.

The recycle bin in Windows behaves, for the most part, just like a regular folder. You can drag files into and from it, you can select multiple files with a shortcut or using a mouse, and you can sort and group files according to various criteria. The only major difference is the presence of an additional ribbon menu. This menu hides all the special commands and options related to the recycle bin itself, among them the option to empty the recycle bin and the option to restore all items.

By clicking on the restore option, you tell Windows to move all deleted files from the recycle bin back to their original locations. This rarely takes more than just a few seconds. Of course, you can also restore selected files individually wherever you want.
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How to Recover Deleted Files from Recycle Bin

Files in the recycle bin take up space on the storage drive where the operating system is installed. Depending on how often you empty the recycle bin, this can be as much as 50 GB or even more. If you don’t really need the files in the recycle bin, it makes sense to get rid of them and empty the recycle bin. When you do that, Windows marks the space the files occupy on your storage device as empty, allowing other applications to overwrite it with other data.

It can take quite a lot of time before the files emptied from the recycle bin get overwritten with other data. The time it takes mostly depends on two factors: how large your main drive is and how often you use your computer. If you have a 2 TB hard drive and write roughly 50 GB of data every week onto it, the chances that the deleted files from the recycle bin will be overwritten by the new data are much slimmer than if your hard drive is just 256 GB large. Similarly, if you use your computer 10 hours every day, the chances that the random read and write activity you cause will overwrite the deleted files are much higher than if you use your computer for just an hour every day.

How long it takes for the deleted data to become overwritten by other data is important because that’s how long you have to recover them using a data recovery software solution like Disk Drill. Only a specialized data recovery application can help you recover deleted files from the recycle bin — the Windows operating system doesn’t come with any tools for data recovery, apart from the recycle bin.

How to Recover Deleted Files from Recycle Bin

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How to Retrieve Files Deleted from Recycle Bin

Fortunately, there are easy-to-use data recovery applications like Disk Drill, which allow anyone to reliably retrieve files deleted from the recycle bin with a click of a button. This is possible because Disk Drill goes beyond the data recovery capabilities of the Windows operating system, focusing, instead, on the underlying filesystem.

Disk Drill’s most powerful data recovery method is the Deep Scan algorithm. Deep Scan looks for file signatures on the selected storage device, allowing it to recognize and recover even files that other data recovery solutions would consider to be forever lost. Its huge database contains over 200 file signatures, covering virtually every popular file format in existence.
How to Retrieve Files Deleted from Recycle Bin
You can use Deep Scan on any storage device you want. Disk Drill supports standard hard drives, modern solid-state disks, memory cards, and external USB drivers, just to name a few. It can read data from multiple file systems, including NTFS, FAT32, EXT, and HFS+. Despite how capable the Deep Scan algorithm is, using it is shockingly simple. After launching Disk Drill, you simply select the storage device from which you would like to recover deleted data and click on the Recover button. In many ways, the Recover button is the soul of Disk Drill. Yes, there’s more to Disk Drill than this button — you can play with advanced settings and control the recovery process in depth — but the fact that it’s possible to undelete recycle bin content with a single click empowers even inexperience computer users to quickly and easily get back all lost files.

Recover Deleted Files from Trash on Mac

Quick Recovery Method

Another data recovery method included in Disk Drill is called Quick Recovery. As the name suggests, Quick Recovery prioritizes data recovery speed over data recoverycomprehensiveness. It works best for recently deleted files. If you want to recover files that have been deleted for a while, you should use the Deep Scan method instead.

Regardless of which recycle bin recovery method you choose, you will be ultimately presented with an assorted list of results. You can filter the list of results according to various criteria and sort it just like files and folders in Windows Explorer. Restoring the files from the list is a matter of a simple mouse click. How to Retrieve Files Deleted from Recycle Bin

Recovery Vault

Included with Disk Drill are several extra features designed to help you protect your files and folders against data loss caused by malware, user error, or hardware failure. The one extra feature that arguably stands out the most is called Recovery Vault. Think of Recovery Vault as a digital safe for your files and folders. Everything you place inside it is automatically protected, allowing you to recover the content of Recovery Vault with a single click, which is, after all, characteristic for all data recovery with Disk Drill.

The simplicity of the data recovery process, coupled with Disk Drill’s excellent performance and its features, is what makes the software the best data recovery solution for professional and home users alike. But you don’t need to take our word for it — you can download Disk Drill for Windows from the official website and use it to recover up to 100 MB of data for free. Buy it only after you’ve verified that the software meets your expectations and the promises of its developer. That said, Disk Drill is already trusted by hundreds of thousands of professional and home users from around the world, and it has been downloaded over 10 million times.

Data Loss Comes Unannounced

So far, we’ve been dealing mostly with a single type of data loss: data loss caused by a user error. The recycle bin is there to give users another chance to recover deleted data before it’s too late. Mistakes happen, however, which is why it’s so handy to have a reliable data recovery solution such as Disk Drill, using which it is possible to restore recycle bin without any advanced IT knowledge.

But sometimes users do everything right and data loss still occurs. These days, by far the most prevalent cause of unexpected data loss is malware. While the danger caused by traditional viruses has virtually vanished over the years, other types of malware have risen, threatening computer users around the world and causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Among them is ransomware, a type of malicious software that prevents or limits victims from accessing their system. To unlocked the locked system, ransomware creators commonly demand ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Data Loss Comes Unannounced
Sometimes the extend of the damage caused by malware is so severe that many data recovery solutions can’t help. The same applies also for sudden hardware failure, which does occur even with modern SSDs and USB drives.

In these cases, it pays off to have a comprehensive data recovery solution like Disk Drill, which comes with useful data backup tools that make it possible to easily backup an entire volume or partition from a drive and store the backup securely somewhere else.

As you can see, Disk Drill can help you protect yourself against all causes of data loss, ensuring that you won’t ever lose any valuable work. The fact that you can download it for free and have it ready on your computer for emergency purposes should be enough by itself to convince you to get it right now.
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How Disk Drill serves other users

  • djsumpter
    djsumpter
    I am very grateful for your awesome product, Disk Drill. I have already installed the amazing software on my Windows XP and it has helped me to restore data I accidentally formatted from my external ntfs drive.
  • Mike W.
    Mike W.
    There is so much that Disk Drill offers to its users. The greatest of them all in the undelete technology, it is easy to use and we would gladly recommend some extra features that would be valuable.