How to Retrieve Deleted Computer Files Using Glary Utilities

Have you ever deleted a file and immediately decided that you want the file back? In Windows, you can undo a delete or restore a file in the recycle bin. What if you can’t undo or restore an emptied recycle bin? There is a way to recover a permanently deleted file. Here’s how.

The difficulty is easy and the items that you need is a computer running Windows and Internet access for downloading free tools to help you recover files.

When a file is deleted in Windows and can’t be undeleted, you can use a number of free utility programs to recover the file. When the file is deleted, the operating system (Windows) will remove the file from a file directory. To Windows, the file doesn’t exist. But the file will linger until it gets overwritten with another file. Windows will consider the deleted file space, free space.

Go the resource below, the link to download.com, to search for an undelete program. Use the search term, “undelete” and you will see many programs to choose.

Look at Fig 1.On the left, click on “Free” to narrow search. In this example, 42 free software was found.Your results will vary because new software are added over time.

The program, Glary Undelete was the first to show up on the list. This program will be used as an example. You can try other software, which will have similar instructions to undelete.

Install the Glary program (it is really Glary Utilities). It will ask you to install the Ask toolbar and make ask.com the default search engine. Uncheck the options so that no changes will be made to your internet home page.

Run the Glary Utilities program. The main window is shown in Fig 3. Click on the Privacy and Security button on the left to get the File Undelete option.

In the File Undelete search box in Fig 4, enter the name of the document you want to undelete. You can enter wild cards to do partial searches like *.doc, *.jpg, *.mp3, etc. In this example, *.* will look for every deleted file. Shown is a sample search result.

Depending on how many files the computer has to search and the speed of your computer, the search for an undelete file or undelete files could take a minute to several minutes.

Note in the sample search that 790 HTML documents were found, 289 Jscript files were found, and so on. In this example, the HTML documents were selected. The names of the 790 files are shown on the right with an indicator such as “overwritten”, “poor”, or “very good”. You still have the option to restore no matter what.

You must realize that when you do a file recover, you may not be successful if you keep using your computer. Eventually, the computer will use the free space containing the recoverable file and overwrite on that space.

See Fig 5.If you check off a file or files to recover, the restore button on the lower right will appear. Click on this and the software will ask where you want to put the recovered data. Open the recovered data to check if the recovery was successful.