XP Undelete

Introduction

It’s happened to everyone: you click a file and delete it by mistake. You look into the recycle bin, but the file isn’t there. There are no current backups, of course, and hours of work seem to be lost forever. This is where XP Undelete comes in; it may still be able to recover the file and save your work.

ScreenShot

How to Use

After starting XP Undelete, a wizard appears that will guide you through the recovery process step by step.

Select drive

In the first step, it displays a list of the drives connected to your computer. Select the drive you wish to recover the file from. Click Next to continue.

Search files

In the next step, A deleted file explorer will appear. You can find what you are looking for in it.

Click "Find special file" button to enter a Search criteria. This can help you filter out the file you are looking for. You can enter the full name, or you can use wildcards (*) or only specify the parts of the name that you remember. If you are looking for a Microsoft Word document for example, you may wish to search for “*.DOC”. If you wish to specify multiple search terms at the same time, separate them with a semi colon.

Search results

XP Undelete now scans the selected hard disks for deleted files. The progress is shown within the search result table, which is initially empty. Please be patient as the search process can take a while. When the search is done, the program lists all found files that are matching your search criteria. The searched files table contains the name, original path, size, type and the condition the file is in. You may notice that the first letter of some file names has been removed – this is done by Windows on FAT disks to make the file invisible to the system.

Recovering files

If you find the file you’re looking for, select it. You can select multiple files by holding down the CTRL key while pressing the left mouse button. After you have selected all files you want to recover, press the "Restore to" button to begin the recovery process. XP Undelete will then try to restore the selected files so that they are available to Windows again.

Condition of a file

XP Undelete displays text in the category condition for every deleted file, stating the probability of a successful restoration of that file. Two possible conditions exist:

Good: The hard disk location occupied by the file seems to be unoccupied by another file at the moment. There is a good chance that the file may be restored successfully.

Poor: The hard disk location occupied by the file has been partially replaced by other files. There is, nevertheless, a chance to restore the file, at least partially.

Please note that that these statements are estimates only. There is no way to definitely evaluate what has happened to the hard disk location occupied by a file since its deletion.