How I recovered a deleted file

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It's never a good moment when you realize you deleted a file you need and it's not in the trash. It's been totally deleted. This happened to me this morning after I had just finished writing a creative document. I saved the file and just left it in a working folder while I did some email and electronic housekeeping. A while later it was still there with some junk files which I deleted and then looked and saw I had also accidentally deleted the document file. I had not even sent it to the trash from where it would have been simple to restore. The stress and grief I went through on loosing a file was not pleasant but I can share with you how I was able to recover the deleted file.

Recovering the deleted file did not happen easily with my first attempt. In fact I spent about four hours trying different ways while feeling a lot of remorse. First, I used a popular app, Recuva. It did work fast but it was not able to recover the file. I tried an app called "Data recovery" which was as slow as molasses and was totally useless. Next, I thought I'd approach it with some linux tools, or cross platform tools, and tried testdisk. Alas, that did not work.

I was ready to give up and resign myself to the loss, when I decided to try one more app called R-Undelete. The download appeared to be for Windows and offers to create a portable version in any directory or on a usb key and warns not to use the same logical partition that contains the deleted file. The R-undelete program provides a simple GUI, performed quickly and found the deleted file by name and a tmp file with a similar name. It was easy to undelete both files after which opening the recovered document file with LibreOffice triggered a message the file appeared to be corrupted with an option to attempt to fix it, following which the file opened successfully with the contents as they were before the file was deleted. A joyful feeling to end the ordeal.

Web Link:

R-Undelete, free file undelete and recovery tool, https://www.r-undelete.com/