Anyone who's ever used a computer for any length of time has experienced the sensation of losing an important file through many reasons or injudicious use of the Delete key. Sometimes, though, what's lost can be found again.

If you accidentally deleted the file, steps:

1. Double-click on the Recycle Bin in Windows or the Trash on a Mac to see if the file is still there.

2. If you find the file, drag it to the desktop. To return the file to its original location in Windows, click on the file and select Restore from the drop-down menu.

3. If the file is no longer in the Recycle Bin or the Trash, look for a backup. If your PC is on a network that has regular backups, check with the system administrator to see if it's possible to retrieve a saved copy of the file.

4. Try using our commercial file recovery utility - Data Recovery Wizard that scans the disk for recognizable data. When you delete a file, the operating system probably won't erase the actual bits from the disk until it needs them for something else; therefore, you may be able to recover some data.

5. If you decide to use Data Recovery Wizard, don't install it on the same disk that you're hoping to retrieve the file from, or you might overwrite the data you're trying to recover. Launch the software from a CD-ROM or a External hard drive. And if you download it directly from the Internet, don't download it onto the disk from which you deleted the file.

If your hard disk crashed, steps:

1. Try a commercial disk-repair utility, although success with these is somewhat limited if you didn't install the software before you experienced the crash.

2. If a disk appears to be irreparable and if the data is valuable enough, you can send the entire disk to a specialty drive recovery service that will disassemble it and retrieve as much data as possible. Expect to pay at least a couple hundred dollars, though (payable even when they don't recover anything). Is backing up regularly starting to sound like a good idea?

Eventually, all hard drives crash. If you can't back up your entire drive, at least back up the data that you wouldn't want to lose forever.

Do some preventive measures. First, you have to make imaging of your bad hard disk onto a good one. This is your only way of keeping your hard disk's status on condition. If, somehow, you fail in your attempts to recover your disk, you still have a backup. So you would have chances to retry recovering another way.

Use Data Recovery Wizard to recover files from a Drive containing lost file(s) or folder(s) which didn't lost the partition, follow these steps:

1. Click the "Complete Recovery" button on the main window of Data Recovery Wizard.

2. You can see a list of your logical volumes found on your computer.

3. Choose one of logical and press the "Next" button (if you are familiar with file system details, you can change "Option" before pressing the "NEXT" button).

4. Data Recovery Wizard will read file system on selected volume.

5. This step will launch the Intelligent Searching interface to search the file system which has been used in this volume.

6. You will see Select Recognized Partition Page which list found file systems in this volume.

7. Please select one or more partitions with the file systems which you are sure or unsure.

8. And then, the Data Recovery Wizard will enter Building directories interface to find files.

9. After this scanning is finished, you'll see file/folder tree.

10. Select the file(s) or folder(s) that you want to recover and press the "NEXT" button.

11. Select a directory and press the "NEXT" button to save the data.

Please see "Complete Recovery" for more details.

The demo version of Data Recovery Wizard gives you a much fairer idea about chances of data recovery from your hard disk before deciding upon the purchase. You can buy full version to recover data!

Caution: Never save the data to the partition or drive from where you are recovering data, for it may result in overwriting of data, and would result in permanent data loss!!!