How to Recover Deleted Documents (Word/PPT/PDF/Excel)/Pictures for Free

It must drive you crazy when you find your finished or unfinished documents just gone without any warning and you can’t find them anywhere on your computer or USB flash drive. It means you will miss the most important meeting or you  have to start from scratch. Just calm down. It’s not as bad as what you can think of.

The fact is that you can recover deleted documents, like Word doc, presentation Power Point, PDF files, Excel workbooks, etc. from your computer in some ways. You should know that no matter how you lost or the files, deletion or file system crash, the files are still on the hard drive for sometime before they’re permanently replaced or we say overwritten by new data.

It means you can recover the deleted documents if you hurry up to rescue them in time. Here in the following, 3 free ways are introduced for you to recover deleted documents, pictures, videos and other types of files.

Method #1. Using FREE Data Recovery Software to Recover Deleted Files (Strongly Recommended)

Why using data recovery software is strongly recommended to recover deleted files? As I have mentioned before, the lost files are not gone, but invisible in the original hard drive. If they can’t be recovered in time, then they’ll be replaced if there is any operation on the hard drive or computer. And data recovery software is professional tool to recover deleted files. You can fully depend on it.

iBeesoft Free Data Recovery is the freeware you can use to recover deleted files. The data recovery success rate can be as high as 99.65%. Besides recovering different types of files from various storage devices (computer internal hard drives and external hard drives), It can fix the corrupted of documents, videos, and pictures. It’s a professional data recovery worth your trying.

Here are the steps you need to follow to recover all your deleted documents from your computer.

1. Download and install iBeesoft Freee Data Recovery software on your PC and then run it. 

Please note that iBeesoft Data Recovery for Mac is available to scan and display recoverable files for totally free and it can recover up to 200MB files for free. If you have a MacBook or iMac, you can download the Mac version.

2. In the main screen, you will see all the available drives for recovery.

3. At the bottom of the screen, you will see a hyperlinked text that says, “Go to Settings”. Click on it to see the file types that you can scan for. To shorten scan time, make sure only the “Document” box is checked, and all others are unchecked. Click on the confirm button to go back

4. Once back on the main screen, select the drive you want to scan by hovering over it. You will see a green “Scan” button which you will need to click to start the scanning process. If you are looking for deleted documents in an external storage, then make sure it is connected to your computer before running the software.
5. In the next screen, you will see all the files you can recover. Select the ones you want to recover and then click on the “Recover” button on the bottom right of the screen to download them to your computer.

Compared with other freeware, this one offers you more features and performs better in data recovery. You can learn more about it.

1. Recover 2GB Deleted Files for Free

The most highlighted feature of iBeesoft Free Data Recovery tool is that users can recover up to 2GB files for totally free, which is seldom available for any data recovery freeware. For documents, this is a large space, and most people can recover almost everything they have lost without needing to buy the full version of the software. This much space is not offered by any other tool in the market.

2. Support 1000+ File Types, Covering All Daily Files

The focus of this article is to help you recover the most common document formats including those used in MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, and PDFs. While iBeesoft Free Data Recovery supports all the file formats for these applications, it also extends its scope to a wide range of other document formats. You can find all the formats that you can possibly have and use this software to recover them quite easily.

3. Recover Files from 2000+ Devices

While the formats of the documents you want to recover do matter a lot, another thing that has equal importance is the storage medium. It is not necessary that your documents are only stored on your computer. In fact, they can also be present on external storage devices like HDDs, USB sticks, and memory cards. You can connect them to your PC and the software will also find deleted documents on those media.

4. Intuitive and Easy to Use

The best part about using iBeesoft Free Data Recovery is that it lets you find all the deleted documents you want without putting you in any hassle. All the complicated stuff happens in the background as you follow a few simple steps and recover all the deleted documents you want in no time.

Method #2. Recover Documents Using File History

This method will only work if you have set up the Backup option in your Windows PC. To use the File History option, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Click on the Windows icon in the taskbar and type “restore files”. You will see an option appear that will say, “Restore your files with File History”. Click on it.
2. In the window that appears, find all the historical versions of the files and folders that you backed up.
3. Select the ones you want to retrieve and click on the restore button. You can either restore the documents to their original location or select a new location.

Method # 3. Recover Documents Using Previous Version

This one is a lot simpler and straightforward, but it only works for available files. In case you lost specific documents in a folder, what you can do is the following:

1. Right-click on the folder and select the “Restore previous versions” option.
2. Open the files as well to make sure you are restoring the correct version.
3. Select the version you want to restore to and click on the Restore button.

Summing Up

As you can see, the first option is clearly the most comprehensive and effective one when it comes to restoring deleted documents if you have lost files accidentally. The other two can be handy as well but only if your backups are up to date and frequent. It means your daily backup is very important. Just remember that you should always have more than 1 copy of an important file on different types of storage devices. It’s the safest way to prevent data loss issues.