Deleting a file normally removes the entry that points to it rather than the contents, which is why recovering deleted files works at all. The file sits where it always sat until something writes over it. That makes the next hour more important than any program you could download, and it makes solid state storage a different conversation, which this page is straight about.
Deleted files are logical work, so no fix, no fee applies in full. One drive or SSD £300 + VAT, cards and pen drives £250 + VAT, after a diagnostic that costs nothing.
A deleted file survives until something is written over the top of it, so the recovery question is never really about the deletion. It is about everything that has happened since. These are the six versions that reach this bench.
Far and away the commonest job of the lot. Emptying the bin drops the index entries and marks that space as free, but the contents stay on the platters untouched. Stop using the drive and most of it is still sitting there.
Holding Shift while deleting skips the Recycle Bin by design, so there is nothing to restore from and no undo. The underlying position is identical to an emptied bin, and the clock started the moment you carried on working.
Files removed from a mapped drive or a shared folder never touch the Recycle Bin on your own machine. They go at the far end immediately, and the recovery is done on the storage that held them rather than the computer you deleted them from.
This undoes more deletions than any other single act. Downloading and installing a program onto the disk you want back writes fresh files into the free space where the old ones are still lying. Install to a different disk, or better, do nothing at all.
Solid state storage does not behave like a platter. TRIM tells the drive to clear the blocks behind a deleted file so the controller can reuse them, and it usually runs within minutes. Once it has, the data is genuinely gone and no software will change that.
Each of those steps costs more than the one before it. A deletion followed by a quick format is usually good. A deletion followed by a format followed by two weeks of ordinary use is where the honest answers start getting shorter.
On a hard drive running NTFS or exFAT, deleting a file changes two small things and leaves everything else alone. The record describing that file in the master file table is flagged as no longer in use, and the clusters it occupied are marked in the allocation bitmap as available. The contents are not touched at all. Nothing goes round afterwards scrubbing them, because that would cost time the operating system has no reason to spend. Your document, photograph or video is lying precisely where it was, complete, waiting for the moment the drive puts something else in that space. Recovery works by reading the raw sectors, finding the orphaned records and the file signatures behind them, and writing what is found out to different storage entirely. That is why recovering deleted files from a hard drive is routine work on this bench, and why the identical job on solid state storage is a different conversation.
Every minute a drive stays in service, Windows and macOS write to it without consulting you. Temporary files, browser cache, log entries, thumbnail databases, a security update quietly downloading in the background. Any one of those writes can land in the free space your deleted file still occupies, and once it does, that part of the file is beyond anybody. If the deletion happened on the disk your operating system runs from, shut the machine down rather than tidying up first. If it happened on an external drive, a memory card or a pen drive, unplug it and put it somewhere safe. Nothing at all is lost by waiting. A great deal is lost by carrying on.
The picture on solid state storage is different, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. Flash cannot be overwritten in place, so a block has to be erased before it can be written again. To keep the drive quick, the operating system issues a TRIM command listing the blocks a deleted file no longer needs, and the garbage collection inside the drive clears them in the background, typically within minutes of the deletion. After that there is nothing left to find, on this bench or any other. There are exceptions worth checking, and we check them: TRIM does not travel across most USB enclosures, some older adapters never pass it on, and a deleted volume is a different case from a deleted file. But on an internal SSD or NVMe blade the working assumption has to be that speed matters enormously. Power the machine down now rather than after lunch.
A surprising number of deletions never reach the bin. Shift and Delete bypasses it deliberately. Files removed from a mapped network drive or a NAS share are deleted at the far end the instant you confirm. Anything deleted from a USB stick or a memory card goes straight out, because removable media has no bin of its own. Files larger than the bin allowance are removed rather than stored. A command prompt del does not use it, and neither does a script tidying a folder on a schedule. In every one of those cases the underlying position is the same as an emptied bin: the data is still on the media, unreferenced, until something overwrites it. Cards and pen drives are recovered at £250 + VAT and are covered in more detail on the memory card recovery and USB stick recovery pages.
A fair few of these jobs arrive with two problems stacked on top of one another: files deleted, then a quick format run in the hope of making the disk behave, then more work done on top of that. Each layer makes the reconstruction harder without necessarily making it impossible, because a quick format rewrites the file table and leaves the contents where they were. Names and folder structures are the first casualties, so what comes back may need sorting by file type and date rather than arriving in the tree you remember. Where a format is the main event, the formatted drive recovery page covers the specifics, and a volume that has gone missing altogether belongs under partition recovery.
Recovering deleted files is logical work, which means it carries no fix, no fee cover in full: nothing back, nothing to pay. That cover is for logical faults only, so if the diagnostic finds the disk is failing electronically or mechanically as well, the terms move to 50% of the quoted price upfront and you hear that before you agree to anything. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT whatever machine it came out of, and a USB pen drive or memory card is £250 + VAT. There is no collection service, so the media is posted to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, about 35 miles away and next working day by tracked post. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after arrival and produces one written figure, and most completed recoveries take 2-4 working days once you have approved it. If you want to check something before you pack the drive, the freephone number is 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Every hour of ordinary use writes over a little more. Diagnosis is free and the figure comes in writing.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.