The first ten minutes after data loss decide most of the outcome. Not the software you eventually choose — what you do right now. This page is deliberately short, because you are probably in a hurry.
Deleted data survives until something overwrites it. Every file saved, every log written, every thumbnail regenerated is a chance to destroy what you are trying to recover. If it is an external drive or card, unplug it. If it is your system drive, shut the computer down — not sleep, off — and recover it from another machine.
The first five minutes
- Stop using the device. Unplug external drives and cards. Power down the computer if the loss was on its system drive.
- Do not format, even when Windows insists. That prompt means the file system header is damaged, not that the drive is empty.
- Do not run chkdsk, Disk Utility First Aid, or any repair tool. These fix the file system by discarding what they cannot reconcile, and what they cannot reconcile is your data.
- Do not install recovery software onto the affected drive. Install it somewhere else. This is the most common self-inflicted disaster in the whole process.
- Listen, if it is a hard drive. Clicking, beeping or grinding means mechanical failure. Power it off and stop — see below.
- Check the obvious places. Recycle Bin, Trash, Google Photos Bin, Recently Deleted, cloud backups, another device signed into the same account. A surprising share of cases end here.
Then image the drive before you scan it
If the device is at all unwell — slow, throwing errors, disappearing and reappearing — make a byte-for-byte image before you do anything else, and run every subsequent attempt against the image file.
This gives you unlimited attempts instead of one, and it means a tool that disappoints you costs nothing but time. Disk Drill, Stellar and R-Studio all include imaging.
When software is the wrong answer
Clicking, beeping, grinding, burning smells, a drive that gets hot, or a drive that was dropped while running. These are mechanical failures. Every extra second of power causes more physical damage to the platters and makes professional recovery harder and more expensive. No software helps. Unplug it and get a quote from a cleanroom lab.
Also stop if the data is genuinely irreplaceable and you are not confident. A failed DIY attempt can turn a $600 lab recovery into an impossible one. Labs quote after diagnosis and reputable ones charge nothing if they recover nothing.
Then pick the right guide
- Which software to use, ranked
- SD card and memory card photos
- USB flash drive
- Drive not showing up
- “You need to format the disk”
- You already formatted it
- SSD, where the rules are different
- Android · iPhone