How to find recent downloads and other docs, and how to rescue deleted files.
Even computer experts with brand-new equipment have days where a storage device dies, we accidentally delete an important file, or we run out of disk space. If your Windows files are giving you fits, we have fixes. In this article, we address how to find files and recover deleted info. Stay tuned for another piece on how to recover from damaged or reformatted drives and how to optimize storage.
Finding your files
There are two common scenarios where you need to find a file. In the first, you've just downloaded a file, but you didn't note which folder was the destination. By default, both Chrome and Firefox put files in your Downloads folder. Press Ctrl-J in your browser to open a list of recently downloaded files.
Your downloads are sorted in reverse chronology, so the newest download will be at the top. In Chrome, each item has a link labeled Show in Folder. Click that to open the folder containing this file. In Firefox, click the folder icon to the right of the item, or right-click it and select Open Containing Folder. The Windows file explorer will open with your item highlighted.
What if you need to find a file that's not a recent download? You can find the file even if you don't recall its exact name. If you remember which application you used to access it, the app should list recently opened files. In Microsoft Office, for example, you'll see a list in the left-hand pane when you open the app. If you've set Office to go straight to a new document, press Ctrl-O to open this pane. If you still don't see the file, it may have dropped off the list, but it's likely to be in the same folder as the other documents shown in this pane.
Recovering deleted files
Files can get truly lost in a number of ways: You delete a file accidentally, you delete it on purpose and realize later that you need it, the file gets corrupted, or the storage device goes up in smoke (not literally, we hope). The good news is that the file is probably recoverable.
Telling Windows to delete a file doesn't actually erase it, at least not right away. The "delete" instruction just tells Windows to ignore the digital bits that represent this file. Over time, these bits will be overwritten by new files. This is much more efficient for the OS than scrubbing that area of your storage device. So even if you've emptied your Recycle Bin, there are free software tools that can tell Windows to stop ignoring a file's bits, as long as those bits haven't been overwritten yet.
If you are confident that you want to fully erase a file, we can tell you a couple ways to do that.Recuva, as its name implies, can un-delete files as well as erase them. To recover a file, open Recuva, click Next, tell the app which type of file you want to recover (or just click Next again to have it look for all file types), select which location to search (like the Recycle Bin), and click Next one last time. Recuva will take a few moments to analyze this location, and then it will produce a list of recoverable files.
To restore your file to the Recycle Bin, check the box next to the file and click the Recover button in the lower right-hand corner. You can also click the Advanced Mode button in the upper right, which will show you a preview image of the file you've selected (assuming that it's designed to be viewable, like a spreadsheet or a hoto).
The Info tab will show you things like file size, when it was created, and how many bits have been overwritten, if any. If you have deleted a system file, you may need to enable a setting in Recuva to actually see it. In Advanced Mode, click the Options button in the upper right, then the Actions tab, check the box next to "Show files found in hidden system directories," and click the OK button at the bottom of the window.
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