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How-To: Recover Deleted Files in Windows

Restoring Files After Deletion

Have you ever experienced that horrible sinking feeling that comes when-with just one mistaken click-you accidentally deleted that paper or report you've been working on all week? You know you should have backed up that file, but you never quite got around to it-and now you're afraid it may be too late.

Don't panic-it's not! When files are deleted from your computer, they don't disappear all at once. Instead, the links that allow you to access those files are removed, but the file itself remains on your drive.

This means that the information you feared you'd lost isn't actually gone forever-it's still there on your hard drive, MP3 player, camera, or flash drive, so it's still possible to rescue all of that lost data. All you need to know is how to look for it.

ALERT: Don't save or startup programs

American author William Faulkner famously said that "the past is never dead-it's not even past." The same goes for the digital files on your computer. When you delete data from your PC, your digital camera, or your flash drive, it doesn't immediately disappear and turn into digital dust: your PC (or another device) simply redesignates the deleted files as "free space," so later files can be written over the files that have been "deleted." However, the raw data is still there on your drive-it's just more difficult to access, and may be potentially overwritten by other files or programs.

The first thing to do once you realize you've lost or accidentally deleted an important document, photo, or music file is to stop saving new information to the hard drive. You don't want to accidentally overwrite the files that you are trying to recover: but be careful! Writing information to the hard drive isn't just a matter of saving documents, programs, and files (although you should certainly avoid that, too).

What to NOT do

DON'T save documents and files

This is pretty self-explanatory but bears repeating. Unless you absolutely must, you should refrain from saving any program files or documents, since doing so causes your PC to write data to your hard drive and increased the possibility that the data you're trying to save might get overwritten.

DON'T compact or compress your email files or folders

While many email programs provide a compacting or auto-archiving process to save hard drive space, it's much easier to recover a non-compacted email file than one that has already been archived. As a result, you should avoid compacting your email files unless you are running low on disk space, and remember to disable programs that are set to automatically compact or archive your emails.

DON'T restart your computer

For other PC problems, restarting your computer is sometimes a good way to refresh your system and start over with a clean slate. But when you're trying to recover data, a clean slate is the last thing you need! Starting up your PC is a disk-intensive process that causes the system to read and write data to the hard drives, which can overwrite the data you want to recover.

DON'T start or run new programs (except for a data recovery program)

Like starting up your system, opening and starting up a new program can cause your PC to write data that had been cached in its memory (RAM) to the hard drive, potentially saving over your important data.

Recover your data as soon as possible

The sooner you start running a data recovery program, the better your chances of recovery will be. However, even if it's been a little while since you discovered your missing data, all is not lost: even if a file has been overwritten once, it may still be salvaged by an intelligent data recovery program.

iolo's Search and Recover™ program uses proprietary technologies to scan for and recover your important data. Search and Recover's StrongScan® tool sifts through your PC's data on a byte-by-byte level to unearth files and information that other recovery programs may miss, while its SmartScan® sorts through all of this data to help you find exactly what you're looking for. You can opt to recover all deleted files or search specifically by file type-music, images, emails, and more. Get Search and Recover as part of the award-winning all-in-one security and optimization suite System Mechanic® Ultimate Defense™.

Search and Recover's Versatility

Don't forget that Search and Recover can also recover files from flash drives, MP3 players, SD cards, digital cameras, smartphones, and more!

Once you're started the recovery process, remember to take these important first steps:

Create a disk image of the drive where your data was lost

A disk image works as a "snapshot" of your drive. You should take this "snapshot" at once so that you can have an image of the drive to work from before the operating system has had a chance to write any data over your lost file.

Save recovered files to a different drive

Once the recovery program finds your lost files, you will feel flush with success! However, in your moment of triumph, remember that you should not save it back to the same drive where it was lost, because you might accidentally overwrite the deleted file as is it being recovered. Instead, save it to another drive or disk: you can always replace it on your original drive later.

If you have any questions/comments on the above, please email us.

Affiliate Masterclass

Having the right tools can make or break your affiliate-based business.

Affilimate solves two major challenges that come with scaling your affiliate income-keeping track of lots of different affiliate programs to log into and inconsistent or lifeless reporting.

Let's say you have a single article that links to products in 5 different affiliate networks. Trying to figure out how much that article is earning, and whether it's trending up or down after your latest changes, is a time-consuming and manual process. To learn how Affilimate fixes these problems, and much more, check out a great post from the Geniuslink Blog, Essential Affiliate Marketing Tools: Affilimate.

Essential Affiliate Marketing Tools: Affilimate

Today we are diving deep into Affilimate, an affiliate dashboard and data aggregator to explore what makes this type of tool unique and a no-brainer addition to the services that a blogger should be using to maximize their affiliate commissions. We'll also explore one area where I think Affilimate has some room to grow.

But first, let's take a step back to see the forest through the trees and why an affiliate data aggregator may be one of the essential tools you use as a niche/authority website builder, blogger, or website portfolio owner.

Overview

"Half my advertising is working; the problem is I don't know which half."
– Butchered quote from a famous marketer (actual quote)

A very similar challenge is one affiliate marketers face daily in knowing which links are actually working. After countless hours of work, it's very common to have a content site doing well, but outside of some reporting around traffic, most affiliate marketers don't know exactly what pages, products, or links are really working.

Affiliate data aggregators are services built specifically to help with one of the most common challenges that content site owners face — knowing what is and isn't working. In the simplest form, affiliate commission aggregators do the time-consuming work of consolidating all of your sales and commission info from across the various affiliate networks, with their ugly and outdated interfaces, that support the numerous affiliate programs you are likely using (Quick tip: using multiple affiliate programs and providing a multi-retailer approach to product recommendation converts better than just using Amazon's affiliate program!).

While we are still butchering important quotes, the 80/20 Rule (aka Pareo Principle) essentially says that 80% of your work is for 20% of your results (and vice versa). Definitely knowing where to focus your efforts building is hard, and so often, we are focused on the bright, shiny things instead of doubling down and making our top posts perform even better!

So what does an "affiliate dashboard and data aggregator" actually do?

Simply put, the core focus of affiliate reporting aggregators is combining sales and commission information from all of the various affiliate programs across various affiliate networks you are using into a single dashboard. By normalizing and aggregating this data into clear charts and tables, it should 1/ save you time and 2/ help you make smarter choices about what is and isn't working.

Going deeper these tools allow you to go from a black box to know what pages are making the most money! Their goal is to help you realize the "Ah Ha" moment of letting you know that a specific page made you $XXX in commissions, though only a couple of the affiliate dashboard tools do this today (Affilimate being one of them).

A secondary benefit that some affiliate reporting aggregators provide is around the optimization of your integration of affiliate programs and links. They do this by programmatically adding "subIDs" within your affiliate links, then digesting the sales/commission information provided by affiliate networks to separating and attributing each sale based on the subIDs used. This then gives you a detailed analysis of what pages, links, campaigns are performance best (and worst!). The modification of your affiliate links to include the necessary subIDs info is typically done with a small chunk of javascript.

As a quick tangent, as it's a key piece in understanding the value of affiliate reporting aggregators in general and the wizardry of Affilimate in general, is understanding what an affiliate subID is. You've probably heard the term before just under a different name – SID, SubIDs, sub tags, sub-campaigns, campaigns, campaign tokens, cmp, or label as they are called by Affilimate. For each affiliate network, as the link format is often different, there is also a slightly different way to implement a sub tag (minus Amazon's affiliate program that doesn't make subIDs available by default — more on that below). Regardless, the affiliate networks can now report back clicks, sales, and commissions back per unique subIDs. This means that if you put some unique information into a subIDs, say exactly what the product the link was for, where it was placed, etc., you can now understand exactly what's going on. But manually placing a unique subIDs value for each link on your site is often impossible, especially for a mature blog that might have hundreds of posts and thousands of links.

Finally, a tertiary benefit that some of the affiliate reporting aggregators also provide is around checking for link health, the process of ensuring a link is still working, and points to a product that is actually in stock.

Affiliate dashboards/affiliate reporting aggregators vs. affiliate aggregators

It's important to note that "affiliate dashboards" or "affiliate data aggregators" are different from "affiliate aggregators" (a.k.a Sovrn Commerce (fka VigLink), Skimlinks, Cuelinks, etc.) in a couple of different key ways. The biggest difference is that Affiliate Aggregators are primarily focused on ensuring links and phrases are monetized and that you are paid for driving traffic through them. The reporting of your efforts via the affiliate aggregators is a bolt-on service to help provide transparency and trust. Following that, the second big difference is that an affiliate aggregator will pay you while you pay for an affiliate reporting aggregator.

To check out the full article on Geniuslink Blog, please click here.

If you have any questions/comments on the above, please email us.