If you have ever been the victim of your own haste and deleted important photos from your camera or emptied your computers recycle bin only to realize seconds later you had made a big mistake.  

Take heart, I have a free program for you that will make it easier to breath again and recover you deleted files.

The program is called Recuva (pronounced recover) and one recovery from a bad mistake will instantly make you fall in love with this little gem.

Okay, you have download it from File Hippo and installed Recuva now what?

1. Turn off all the programs or applications that you don't need on your computer and scan the drive the file was on to recover the lost file.
2. If you are trying to recover pictures from a media card, stop using the card immediately so you don't overwrite any existing photos or portions of existing photos.
   
3. Remove the card from the Camera and if your card has a write protect tab, engage it. DON'T turn on the camera to recover the data, put the card into a card reader to recover the data (if you don't have one already built into your computer, you can buy a stand alone one cheap).
4. Run the program and follow the steps outlined in the wizard to recover your files be sure to enable the deep scan.  This is going to take a while.  Get a snack or make yourself some tea.
5. You will get a list of files that can be recovered, check the boxes next to the files you want to recover and click the recover button.

If you are trying to recover a file from the recycle bin and can't find it, Windows may have renamed the file (this is normal).  To figure out which file you need, recover all the files and sort them by size and date.  Select the most recent date to find your file.

Files in the recycle bin are named in the following way Dc43.jpg This is short for Disk c, the number is sequential. Windows does not change the file type (so this would be an image file).

More questions?  The forum has lots of information.

Photo Credit: Life is Hard 1 - Photo byFedePizzi - From stock.xchng