How to recover deleted files?

Solution 1:

Your best bet would be to "freeze" the data filesystem and don't alter it. For recovery attempts, make a partition image with dd and try to recover files from there.

WARNING: dd is a dangerous command if you misuse it by mistake, so make sure you understand what it does, how it does it and double check the command line before hitting Enter.

You might want to try TestDisk, it claims to be able to recover stuff from NTFS. Can't vouch for it, because I've never had to deal with such situations (yau, I've never experienced loss of personal data, see below why).

Also, since you said that the data is very important to you, there's something else you must consider. If you would have a backup, that would save you. It seems you don't have one yet, so after dealing with data loss, it'll be a good idea to think about a backup strategy for really important data.

Solution 2:

In the old times I used to use undelete, a DOS command that usually required remembering the first letter of the archive list it showed you (?y_file.doc ) and required no alteration, no save or touch the disk (btw, an overwrite with the same name of the file will kill any possibility of recovering it, as far as I know). As all what can save you is a temporary memory, would be overwritten with new activity.

For NTFS, I have not needed to try, (I am on the same page as Geek, I'm paranoid with backups, so rarely lose something), but from time to time I end up at below site, I am curious if it really is useful. Probably it is, quite, and it is open source :

http://ntfsundelete.com