Data Recovery

How to Recover Deleted Folders from external hard drive

1Data loss could happen

People start to use external hard drive more and more often. Just look at my roommate: he puts all his favorite movies, E-books, and personal information on his external hard drive. Although I know why he likes the drive so much, I wonder if he goes crazy when all data on the drive is lost. Even if he wouldn't go crazy, losing valuable data is heartbreaking. You can just imagine what if you lost all your years' favorite collections.

In fact, things like that could take place. When he wanted to delete one file, but accidentally deleted the whole folder; when he quickly pressed 'Shift + Del', but found that there wasn't any backup; or the file was gone due to other people's mistake operations, and then he lost the data. How to do folder recovery?

2Easy way to recover deleted folders

When this happens, what comes out in our mind is a data recovery. That's to say, using a data recovery to recover deleted folder sounds a great choice, such as Wondershare Data Recovery, a professional and reliable data recovery program with high quality and security. With just 3 steps, you can recover your deleted folders quickly and efficiently, and no tech-skills needed. if you are a Mac user, please choose the data recovery for mac (available for Mavericks), which does the same.

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The Best Data Recovery Software

  • Recover files in 550+ formats from any storage device quickly, safely and completely.
  • 3 Recovery Modes to help you recover lost files under different situations
  • Supports data recovery from recycle bin, hard drive, memory card, flash drive, digital camera and camcoders
  • Preview before recovery allows you to do a selective recovery
  • Supported OS: Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista, Mac OS X (Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 Yosemite) on iMac, MacBook, Mac Pro etc.

Tips: DO NOT install the program on the source partition where you're going to recover lost data.

Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to the computer and launch the data recovery. Select Lost File recovery for Windows users or Deleted File Recovery for Mac users.

restore deleted folders

Step 2. Select the hard drive and begin to scan.

restore deleted folders from external hard drive

Step 3. After the scan, preview and check the recoverable files and begin to recover.

Here you can freely switch between the "File Type" and the "Path" of the file. The  "File Type" classifies files into clear categories like photos, video, audio, documents, email, etc., while the "Path" presents you files as the original location on your computer.

restore deleted folders

The only thing you need to pay attention is: Don't save the recovered files to the space where you lost your files previously, just to be safe consideration.

What you should know: You may know the fact that lost data isn't wiped permanently, until new data overwrites it. What  you should keep in your mind is that don't save any new data to the place where you lost vital data, or the lost data will be overwritten by others, which makes it difficult to recover deleted folder.

3Video tutorial of folder recovery

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Data Recovery

Data Recovery

(Recover lost files)

Recover files in 550+ formats from your computer storage quickly, safely and completely.

Photo Recovery

Photo Recovery

(Recover photo and video)

A professional tool specially designed to recover photos, videos and audio files from storage devices.

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disqus_K95Ejrv1eo
Sure you can try Wondershare Data Recovery to get some or all data out of your hard disk drive, saving them to your computer. Just try the trial version to see what it can find for you. Remember not to format the external hard drive, otherwise, files on it will be erased permanently.
preetamdevarasetti
i have 1 Tb external hard disk drive. whenever i try to open it, it says "you need to format the hard disk before you can use it!" and doesn't open. can i recover the files through wondershare? please help. thank you!
disqus_K95Ejrv1eo
I see. Please contact our support team to give your feedback. Your feedback is very important for us to solve the problem. Thanks!
henryadewale
Yeah they are all in the same video format it was just a couple of video recording of an event. Some were recovered and some just weren't able to be recovered.
disqus_K95Ejrv1eo
hey, the other 5 videos are in the same format with the 3 playable videos? You can't play them, it might be cause by the video format. You can click the Feedback button in the program to submit more information for use to figure out what is wrong with these videos. thanks!
henryadewale
i recently purchased the wondershare data recovery software and used it to find deleted files on my hard drive to which i did but when i clicked the video files i want to recover and hit the recover button it only recovers about 3 of the 8 selected. It does show all 8 files i selected to be recovered in the new saved folder on my laptop but only shows and plays thumbnails for three ; however the others have white plain thumbnails and are little in size and don't play. Bank in the software it shows the size for all 8 videos i selected to be recovered to be around 2GB each but after the recovery process it only shows three video which could be played at that size, the rest were much smaller (~100MB) and of course they had white thumbnail and didn't play...Help please.
disqus_AcTnvUazNw
Amazing data recovery tool! My friend told me about another data recovery utility as Remo Recover and it attracted me with its recovery features.
Selena
This is probably because that your lost movie file has been logically corrupted. In this situation, even you can recover the full file, it can not be recovered as the original one. The best way to recover your lost data is to stop using your device or putting any new data into it. Otherwise data overwritten or corruption can still happen.
Kenny
Hello, i am having a similar problem as a few others here. I was able to recover the movie was was looking for, or at least think i did, however it will not play. it is a .mov, i have tried VLC, Quicktime and media player. Any advice?
Selena
I guess your recovered files are corrupted. This might happen and I'm really sorry for it. Please come to Wondershare support center for more help.
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