When we browse the Internet, most of us download our files to our desktop. After a few weeks of doing this, our desktop becomes cluttered with files. To save time sorting through the clutter, often we’ll just drag everything to your Recycle Bin and then empty it soon after. Only then we realise that we deleted an important work file that we were temporarily storing on the desktop whilst we were making important changes.

Files sent to the Recycle Bin and then emptied through the Recycle Bin are far from lost. Indeed, if those files were only deleted a few days or even weeks ago, there’s a very good chance that they can be recovered in full. Files sent to Recycle Bin aren’t really deleted from your system. Windows is told that it can write files to the location where they were stored – eventually the old file data will be overwritten and recovery will be difficult, but in the short term your files are recoverable.

However, you need recovery software. Recuva is a tool that will enable you recover files that you’ve accidentally deleted in the past, particularly those that you sent to the Recycle Bin and then later emptied from the bin. You can also use Recuva to attempt to salvage photos deleted from your digital camera memory cards, songs from MP3 players and much more.

Improved features in v1.22 include the option to securely delete non-deleted files, better recovery of .TIF files from FAT32 drives and other minor fixes.