TuneUp Undelete
Usage

Using TuneUp Undelete

When you start TuneUp Undelete, a wizard is opened that takes you through the recovery process step by step. First, you must select the drives you want to search for deleted files under Drives to be scanned. The list contains all drives that are available on your system.

Only select the drive on which the files that you wish to recover were deleted. Click Next to go to the next step.

Enter search string

On the next screen, the module allows you to narrow the search to make sure that you don't oversee your file in an endless list of deleted files. It is practical to enter one or more words to search for, but this is not required.

You can enter the name of the file in the Search for box. You do not have to enter the complete file name here, a single word is usually enough to narrow your search. Or if you can only remember the file extension or part of the name, simply use a wildcard such as *.doc or Picture??.jpg. You can enter multiple search terms in the box, but you must separate them with a semicolon.

If you can't remember the name of the file at all, or if you want to search for all recoverable files, simply leave the search box empty.

There are two additional options that also let you narrow your search further:
Option Description
Don't show 0-byte files All files that contain no data whatsoever will be ignored.
Show only files in good condition Makes sure that only files with a good chance of being recovered are shown.

Click Next to begin searching for deleted files.

Search results

TuneUp Undelete now scans all selected drives one after the other. The progress of the search is shown in the empty Search results box. The search may take some time, especially on larger hard drives.

As soon as the search is completed, the module lists all available files that match your search criteria. The table shows the file name, the original location, the file type and the condition of the file.

Don't worry if the first letter of the file name is missing for the files on FAT drives, Windows always deletes the first letter when deleting files on drives with this file system.

Recovering files

If you find a file that you wish to recover in the list, click it to select it. You can select more than one file by holding the Ctrl key while clicking. Then click Restore, and the program will attempt to return the file to the normal Windows environment.

Once the files have been recovered, try to open them in the corresponding program. If the file can be opened, the recovery was successful. If not, then part of the file was already overwritten by another file. And that can often happen sooner than you think.