Guides
Guides for getting your files back
If you have just lost files, the single most useful thing you can do is stop writing to the drive they were on — unplug the card, or stop saving anything to that disk. Deleted data survives until something new lands on top of it, and every minute of ordinary use is another chance for that to happen. These guides explain what happened to your files, what can be read back, and where the data really is gone.
Start here
What to do in the first minutes after losing files
The order of operations that decides how much comes back, and the three common reflexes that quietly destroy data.
Why deleted files can be recovered — and when they can't
What deleting actually changes on a disk, why a memory card recovers so well, and why an internal SSD usually does not.
What happened to your files
Recovering deleted photos from a camera memory card
Cards are the best case in file recovery. What to do with the card, what raw files need that JPEGs don't, and how to check the photos you get back.
Recovering files after emptying the Recycle Bin
Emptying the bin deletes a directory entry, not the file. What NTFS still remembers afterwards, and why speed matters more than software here.
Recovering files after a quick format
A quick format writes a new, empty file table over the old one. The files stay put — which is why formatted cards and disks often come back nearly whole.
The drive asks to be formatted, or shows up as RAW
Windows says it needs to format a drive full of files. What that message really means, and the one button you must not press.
Windows doesn't show the drive at all
Unallocated space, "disk not initialized", no drive letter, a disk out of a NAS, and a disk Windows does not list at all. Five different causes, and only the last one means the data may be gone.
A failing drive: copy it before you scan it
Clicking, stalling, disappearing and coming back. A drive with a hardware fault has a limited number of reads left, and scanning spends them.
How the file systems differ
Reference
What Unlost reads on a drive, and why
The long version: file tables, the journals that remember what the table used to say, signature carving, and why checking a recovered file gives three answers rather than two.
What Unlost can read
File systems, partition layouts and the 64 file types recognised by their contents — plus what is identified but not read.
If Unlost found nothing
Seven things to try in order, the cases where an empty list is the correct answer, and the point at which the honest advice is a recovery lab.
System requirements and supported drives
What Unlost needs to run, how much free space a recovery takes, and which drives, cards and images can be scanned.
The tool these guides use
Unlost is a free Windows application that reads a drive sector by sector and shows what is still readable. It opens the source drive for reading only, writes recovered files to a different drive, and does everything on your machine — what Unlost does to your drive, and what it doesn't sets out exactly what that means, and the privacy page covers what is and isn't collected — counts of downloads and installs, and nothing about your drives or your files.
It is free with no paywall between finding a file and saving it. Who makes Unlost, and why it costs nothing explains how that works, and how it compares to other recovery software gives the questions worth asking about any tool in this category, this one included.
The guides above are written to be useful whether or not you use it. Where data cannot be recovered by any software, they say so.
Unlost is a Windows application. This download is a Windows installer, and it won't run on the device you're reading this on.
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · 4.0 MB installer · install it on a drive other than the one you lost files from