Lost files: what you can try yourself, what a repairer does, and when a laboratory is the answer

Lost files come in three kinds, and the right move depends on which one you have.

Deleted files on a healthy drive are the most hopeful. Nearly every system keeps deleted things somewhere for a while, and you can often get them back yourself in a few minutes. A failing drive needs care, because the wrong move can use up whatever life it has left. And a healthy drive that is encrypted, with nobody holding the key, is a question of keys rather than repairs.

This guide takes them in order: what you can try yourself, what we do when it goes beyond that, and when a clean-room laboratory is the answer.

Before you try anything: stop adding to the drive

One rule comes first. Do not save, download or install anything on the device the files went missing from until you have finished looking.

Microsoft explains why in its Windows File Recovery guide. When a file is deleted, Windows marks the space it used as available, and the contents can still be there. But any use of the computer can create new files, and they can land on top of the old one at any time. Microsoft’s advice, for the best chance of getting a file back, is to use the computer as little as possible.

So where you can, look in the cloud from a different device: a phone, a tablet or another computer. Opening a bin does no harm. Downloading a recovery program onto the same drive can.

Deleted, not damaged: where to look first

Most systems hold deleted items in a bin before they let them go. These time limits come from each company’s own help pages, checked on 3 November 2026.

Where it was deleted	Where to look	How long it stays
A Windows PC	The Recycle Bin	Until the bin is emptied, unless Storage Sense clears it
OneDrive	Recycle bin, at onedrive.com	30 days on a personal account; 93 days on a work or school one, unless the administrator changed it
A Mac	The Bin, in the Dock	Until the Bin is emptied, unless it is set to empty after 30 days
iCloud Drive	Recently Deleted	30 days
iPhone or iPad photos	Recently Deleted, in Photos	30 days
Google Photos	Collections, then Bin	30 days
Google Drive	Bin, at drive.google.com	30 days

Windows: the Recycle Bin, File History and Previous Versions

Open the Recycle Bin, select what you want back, right-click and choose Restore, and it goes back to the folder it came from. Those are Microsoft’s own steps. If Storage Sense is switched on, it clears old items out of the bin after a while, so look sooner rather than later.

If the bin has been emptied, File History may have a copy. It saves your libraries, such as Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music, to an external drive or a network location, provided it was switched on before the files went. Open File Explorer, go to the folder that held the file, right-click the folder and choose Restore previous versions, then pick a version from the list and choose Restore. Microsoft’s File History page has the details.

OneDrive

OneDrive has its own recycle bin, and files deleted from OneDrive online do not appear in the computer’s Recycle Bin at all. Sign in at onedrive.com, choose Recycle bin in the navigation pane, tick what you want and select Restore. Microsoft 365 subscribers can also roll their whole OneDrive back to any point in the last 30 days. Once something has gone from the OneDrive recycle bin itself, Microsoft says it cannot be restored.

Mac: the Bin and Time Machine

Click the Bin in the Dock, then drag the file out, or select it and choose File, then Put Back. Items deleted from iCloud Drive are emptied from the Bin after 30 days whatever the Finder setting, as Apple’s guide to deleting files on a Mac explains.

If Time Machine was backing the Mac up, open the folder the file used to be in, then open Time Machine. Step back through the backups with the arrows and the timeline, select the file and click Restore, and it goes back where it came from. Apple’s Time Machine page has the full steps.

iCloud Drive and iPhone photos

On an iPhone, deleted files are in the Files app: tap Browse, then Recently Deleted under Locations. From a computer, go to icloud.com/iclouddrive and choose Recently Deleted in the sidebar. Apple’s steps are on its Files app page and its iCloud.com page.

For photos, open the Photos app, swipe up and tap Recently Deleted in the Utilities section, then View Album; it opens with Face ID or Touch ID. After 30 days, Apple deletes them permanently.

One thing catches people out. With iCloud Photos switched on, deleting a photo on one device deletes it on every device signed in to the same Apple Account, so the old iPad in a drawer is not a backup.

Google Photos and Google Drive

In the Google Photos app, tap Collections, then Bin, touch and hold the photo, and tap Restore. If a photo is missing but not in the bin, Google suggests looking in the archive too. The steps are on Google’s restore page. In Google Drive, go to drive.google.com, click Bin on the left, right-click the file and choose Restore; Google’s Drive help has the rest.

If the files were on a phone and none of this brings them back, our page on recovering deleted photos explains what is realistic from there.

Why stopping matters, and what an SSD changes

If the file is in no bin and no backup, what happens next depends on the kind of drive it was on.

On a traditional hard drive, the spinning kind, deleting a file removes the signpost to it instead of the contents. The old contents sit there until something new is written over them, which is why stopping matters so much: the less the computer writes, the better the odds. If you are not sure which kind of drive you have, our plain-English guide to SSDs and hard drives explains the difference.

A solid-state drive, or SSD, behaves differently. Microsoft’s developer documentation explains that an SSD typically cannot write over old data where it sits; it has to clear the space before it can use it again. So when Windows deletes a file on an SSD, it also tells the drive which space the file was using. That message is called TRIM, and Microsoft’s fsutil reference says it is switched on by default. Windows sends it as part of deleting the file, and again during its regular drive optimisation, which by default runs once a week.

Microsoft’s plain-English description is that trimming tells the drive where it can safely do its clean-up work while it is not busy. Its developer documentation is blunter: trimmed areas are “permanently removed from the storage media”.

What that means for you is simple, if unwelcome:

• Once the drive has cleared the space, the file is gone, and no recovery program and no laboratory can bring it back.
• The drive decides when that happens, so nobody can promise how long a deleted file on an SSD survives.
• Anything still in a bin, a backup or a cloud account is untouched by any of this, which is why the bins come first.

Microsoft’s recovery guide makes the same point in one line: when a file cannot be recovered, the space may have been overwritten, “especially on a solid-state drive (SSD)”.

Should you try recovery software?

Microsoft’s own tool, Windows File Recovery, is in the Microsoft Store for files that cannot be restored from the Recycle Bin. Its two main rules hold for any recovery program: recover onto a different drive from the one you are recovering, and use the computer as little as possible meanwhile.

There is a catch. Installing anything writes to the computer’s main drive, which on most home computers is the same drive as your documents and photos. So it is only worth trying on a healthy spinning hard drive, for files that would be a nuisance instead of a heartbreak to lose. If the files really matter, if the drive is an SSD, or if it is making any noise at all, stop and get help instead.

When the drive itself is failing

A failing drive changes the rules, because every hour of use is now wear it may not survive. The warning signs are new clicking, grinding or whirring, freezes that come in bursts, files that vanish or open as nonsense, disk errors at start-up, and days when the machine will not boot. Our guide to the warning signs your hard drive is failing goes through each one.

If you see them, copy the small, irreplaceable things first, while you still can, to somewhere that is not the failing drive. If the drive is making mechanical noises, switch it off and leave it off, because heavy copying can be what finishes it.

This is hands-on work. A failing drive is on our own list of things a remote link cannot fix, because nothing physical travels down a link.

When the drive is encrypted

Here the drive is healthy and the files are all there, but without the key nobody can read them.

On Windows, Microsoft says device encryption is turned on when a computer is first set up with a Microsoft account, or a work or school account, and the recovery key is attached to that account. If the computer asks for its 48-digit recovery key, or a drive from a dead laptop has to be read on other equipment, that key is what unlocks it. Look for it at aka.ms/myrecoverykey, signed in from another device, or ask the IT department if a workplace set the machine up. Microsoft says its own support staff cannot retrieve, provide or recreate a lost key.

On a Mac, Apple says a Mac with Apple silicon or an Apple T2 Security Chip encrypts its data automatically, and FileVault adds the need for your login password. If you forget that password, Apple offers two ways back in: your iCloud account or a recovery key. Forget the password and lose the key as well, Apple warns, and “your files and settings will be lost forever”.

Our guide to the 48-digit recovery key explains where yours is almost certainly stored.

What never to do

• The freezer. It is an old internet legend. A cold drive brought into a warm room gathers condensation, and water is the last thing a failing drive needs.
• Opening a hard drive. The disks, and the heads that read them, live in a case sealed against dust. Take the lid off at a kitchen table and you can turn a recoverable drive into one that no laboratory can save.
• Running recovery software again and again on a clicking drive. A click means a mechanical fault, and no software fixes that. Every scan works the damaged drive hard, and it may have only one good read left in it.
• Writing recovered files back to the same drive. They can land on the very files still waiting to come back, which is why Microsoft’s own tool insists on two different drives. Recover onto a separate drive or a USB stick.
• Resetting or reinstalling to make it work. Microsoft is plain that resetting a device removes all of your files, and a reinstall writes over the drive they are on.

What a repairer does

When it is more than a bin and a backup, that is data recovery, and this is how we approach it, in person across Leeds, West Yorkshire, Harrogate, Knaresborough and York.

• We ask what happened first: what went missing, how, and what the machine has done since.
• We find out whether the drive is the problem at all. A machine that will not start very often has a perfectly good drive inside it, and the real fault is the screen, the board or the power.
• A sound drive in a dead machine comes out and is read on our own equipment, unless the storage is soldered to the board, as it is on many slim laptops and modern Macs; if so, we tell you early. Can you get your files off a laptop that will not turn on? explains.
• A failing drive that still reads is copied first, once you have said yes in writing, and the recovery is done from the copy, so a sick drive is not worked harder than it has to be.
• Deleted files depend on the kind of drive, so we tell you which kind you have before any work starts.
• Recovered files come back on a drive you keep, never the one that failed. Recovery is not always tidy: you can get most of your files back with a few damaged and some of the names lost, and we say so plainly.

When a clean-room laboratory is the answer

Some drives are beyond any software and any repairer’s bench. The clearest case is mechanical failure in a hard drive: clicking, grinding or beeping, a drive that will not spin up, or one that was dropped while it was running. The fault is inside the sealed case.

Getting data off a drive like that means opening it in a clean room, a laboratory where the air is controlled for dust, and often replacing the failed parts with ones from a matching donor drive. It is slow, specialist work, and it does not always succeed. A solid-state drive that has failed outright has no moving parts to replace, so it is a different kind of specialist job again.

We do not open drives. Our terms put the rule for work that goes out in two sentences:

Soldered charging and HDMI ports we replace ourselves. A repair to a single chip or other component on a circuit board, or a drive that needs a clean-room laboratory, goes to a specialist only with your say-so, once we have told you who will do it and what it costs.

If your drive needs a laboratory, you will hear it from us early, rather than after an attempt that made it worse.

The bottom line

Start with the bins, the backups and the cloud, because they are the quickest route back and they ask nothing of the drive.

The drive you stop using has the best odds, and the drive you keep switching on in hope is the one that ends up needing a laboratory.

Once your files are back, make sure this cannot cost you again: how to back up your files is the short version. And when the day comes to part with the old machine, wipe it properly first.