I have to state that I am not satisfy with the way Vista manage files. I have two accidents of deleting wrongly in Vista. I am quite certain that I only selected the unused files and then press Shift + Del. Then the whole directory kissed me goodbye. Outch! I could not believe that. The only solution is using third party undelete programs. I am happy to find Recuva. It is free, simple and fast. Although it could not recover all of my lost files, I could still extract quite a lot of them. Here is the protocol:
1. Keep the system as it is. Do not open or close any programs. This will prevent further damage.
2. Set the sleep mode to never as the process may take quite a long time.
2. Plug an USB key in and dowload Recuva to this USB.
3. Install Recuva to this USB key. The key point here is not writing anything to the hardisk.
4. Do the deep scan.
5. Recover all the available files to the USB. Again, no writing to hardisk.
That’s it. My leason from Vista is:
Never ever ever never do Shift + Del in Vista
