1. What happened, and why the first move decides it
Someone empties the recycle bin, Shift+Deletes the wrong folder, formats a disk that still had work on it, or a partition suddenly asks to be formatted before it can be used. None of these are rare; we see them most days. Here is the short version: most deleted files can come back, and whether they come back depends on what you do in the first few minutes after the mistake.
2. Deleting does not erase anything. Writing does.
To understand recovery, you first have to understand deletion. A file system, NTFS and exFAT alike, keeps a directory the way a book keeps a table of contents: the file body is the text, and the directory records the name, the location and the size. Delete or format, and the system only wipes the directory entry and marks that space as free. The text is still sitting there, untouched, until new data lands on top of it.
That is why recovery software works. It ignores the directory, scans the raw data on the media and rebuilds the text. And it is why recovery fails: overwriting. Download something, save a file, install a program after the mistake, and the new data lands in the free space and buries the old file. At that point nobody can get it back.
So the one step that matters is this: stop writing to that disk immediately. Save nothing to it. Do not install recovery software on it. Do not download a movie to test it. If the files were on the system disk, shut the machine down and scan the disk from another computer.
One piece of bad news: on an SSD, an accidental delete is usually unrecoverable. SSDs have TRIM. Once the system tells the drive those blocks are no longer in use, the controller clears them in the background to keep performance up, and the data is physically gone within minutes to hours. That makes an SSD deletion a race against the clock.: power it off fully, not sleep, and get it to a lab immediately. Mechanical drives, USB sticks and SD cards have no such mechanism, which buys you far more time.
3. What to do, in order
Step 1: check the recycle bin. An ordinary deletion is all there; right-click and restore. If it was Shift+Delete, or the bin has been emptied, go to step 2.
Step 2: look for a backup. Think back: did you send the file on WeChat, save it to a cloud drive, drop it in a work group? The PC WeChat client stores received files under Documents\WeChat Files by default, which a lot of people do not know. If a backup exists, use it. Recovery always carries risk; a backup carries none.
Step 3: judge the media and the timing. A mechanical drive, USB stick or SD card with an accidental delete and no further writing is worth a software attempt. An SSD deletion should skip the software and go straight to a lab. If a lot has been written since, even a scan will mostly return fragments.
Step 4: software recovery, mechanical media only. Install the recovery tool on a different disk, on a USB stick for example if the deleted files were on the system disk. Scan the partition the files came from. Preview before you restore, because only a file that previews properly is intact. Save the recovered files to another disk, since writing them back to the original is a second overwrite. Windows File Recovery and Recuva are both free and adequate for a simple deletion.
Step 5: treat a mistaken format as its own case. If nothing has been written since the format, almost all the data is still there, but recovery has to rebuild the directory from the file system structure, which is harder than a simple deletion. If you are not confident with the software, send it in rather than scanning it repeatedly and making a mess of the disk.
4. When to stop and call a professional
Do not spend the afternoon on software when:
- The data is valuable enough that you cannot afford a failure: wedding footage, engineering drawings, accounts, source code.
- An entire partition was formatted by mistake, or a lost partition is asking to be formatted.
- The deletion happened on an SSD, where the clock is measured in hours.
- You already scanned once and found nothing, or recovered to the wrong place and caused an overwrite.
- The drive is making noises or reporting bad sectors. Whether to fix the disk or recover first matters, and the wrong order loses the data.
A professional recovery images the media read-only and works from the image, so nothing is ever written to the original. That is the real difference between us and a software scan. The overall workflow is on our data recovery overview page, and the mechanical-drive specifics are under hard disk recovery.
5. Price reference
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis and assessment | RMB 0 | You pay only on success; quoted before any work |
| Accidental deletion recovery | from RMB 300 | Mechanical media, not overwritten |
| Mistaken format recovery | RMB 400-800 | By data volume and file system complexity |
| Lost partition or damaged DBR | RMB 500-800 | Logical faults run RMB 300-800 |
| SSD deletion rescue | Quoted after assessment | Depends on whether TRIM has already run |
Guangzhou Panyu prices for 2026. You pay only when the recovery succeeds; a failed recovery costs nothing at all.
6. Two outcomes from the same mistake
In May 2026 a customer formatted an entire external drive holding wedding videos. He had meant to format another disk and picked the wrong one. Fortunately he realized immediately and saved nothing else to it. We imaged it, rebuilt the NTFS structure and recovered every video in an hour: 68GB, all intact, RMB 400. He said the RMB 400 bought back the record of a once-in-a-lifetime day.
The same year, the opposite case: a customer had scanned the disk twice with software and copied a few films onto it before bringing it in. What came back were fragments that would not play, and only a small part of the footage was saved. The first move after a deletion is not to download a recovery tool. It is to stop.
7. Where to find us
We are at 3-8 Jinlong Road, Dalong Street, Panyu District, Guangzhou, and we cover Panyu and Nansha on site. Phone 18825126836 or 020-39029800, Monday to Saturday, 09:00-18:00.