If you are keen to recover a deleted video, your first thought might be to use video recovery software. This begs the question: how can you choose between various programs that pledge to help users recover video content?
It can be heartbreaking if you do lose a video — whether it was originally filmed for work purposes or captured a special memory in your personal life. Videos can vanish from computers for such reasons as:
- Accidental deletion: Maybe you flinched, and your finger clicked on the computer’s mouse when the cursor was hovering in the wrong place?
- Malware intrusion: Malicious software that makes its way into your computer can corrupt or delete videos.
- Power failure: If your PC unexpectedly shuts down during a video transfer, you may later find yourself searching in vain for that specific file.
Want to know how to recover a video seemingly wiped from your Windows PC? We advise you to try the following steps in search of one that works.
Check the Recycle Bin
Any video you directly delete on a Windows PC will initially be shifted to its Recycle Bin. That’s a preinstalled program you can launch just by double-clicking its icon labelled ‘Recycle Bin’ on the desktop. Then, you can:
- See if your video is listed with its filename in the window
- If you do see that listing, click it to highlight it
- Right-click it to bring up a menu
- On that menu, click ‘Restore’
The video should subsequently be returned to wherever it was previously deleted from on the computer.
Alas, you could fail to find your lost video in the Recycle Bin if you waited too long to check it or the video was removed in some other way.
Dive into Windows’ File History
Several Windows versions come with a feature called File History, which regularly backs up files stored on various parts of the hard drive, including:
- The desktop
- Libraries
- Favorites folders
- Contacts folders
Here’s how to find and search File History in the hope of rescuing your video:
- Type ‘Control Panel’ into the desktop taskbar’s search box;
- Select ‘Control Panel’ from the list of results that subsequently appears;
- Click ‘System and Security’, ‘File History’ and then ‘Restore personal files’;
- Look up the location where you know the video was stored;
- See if File History has any available backups containing that video;
- If it does, select the video before clicking the ‘Restore’ button.
If you don’t find your lost video in the Recycle Bin, it would be imperative for you to check File History next lest a backup of the video potentially gets replaced with a whole new backup lacking it.
Look for Other Backups
If the video was of great sentimental or work-related value to you, try to remember whether the file might have been backed up in some other way.
You could have saved a backup copy to a physical unit, like a:
- Hard drive
- USB flash drive
- SD memory card
- CD or DVD
As these are all examples of storage that data recovery software is capable of scanning speedily on your behalf, you could potentially spare yourself having to manually wade through many files in a bid to trace your video.
Another possibility is that the video was saved to a cloud storage service like Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive.
Try Microsoft’s Windows File Recovery
The good news for Windows 10 and 11 users is that Microsoft also offers them a free-to-use app called Windows File Recovery.
The bad news is that these users could still easily stumble in trying to figure out how to recover deleted video content via Windows File Recovery — as, being a command-line utility, it is not as user-friendly as many other options.
If you do want to give it a go, though, you can download Windows File Recovery from the Microsoft Store.
The Microsoft website provides detailed instructions on how to use Windows File Recovery. Basically, you would need to type each of following details (and in this order) into the program:
- The video recover command
- The recovery destination
- The recovery mode
- The deleted video content’s name or location
Windows File Recovery can be difficult to get to grips with and does not support recovery from cloud storage.
It’s also far from guaranteed to unearth the specific video you seek. Tech writer Lance Whitney has reported in a ZDNET article about Windows File Recovery: “I’ve used It several times, and it’s been decidedly hit or miss.”
He added: “You may want to try it as a first step, but I think you’ll find a good third-party product less frustrating.”
Use a Third-Party Recovery Utility
On a Windows PC, even a video that has been deleted and can’t be found in the Recycle Bin won’t necessarily be gone for good.
That’s because, when the deletion does happen, the operating system will initially leave the file intact but mark its space as available. Your video will ultimately still be there, just hidden from view.
However, try to write as little new data to the computer as possible while you strive to get the video back. Otherwise, you could inadvertently overwrite it.
Fortunately, on all Windows PC versions dating back to Windows XP (SP3), iolo’s Search and Recover software can scour a wide range of storage drives and devices — even cameras — in search of deleted videos.
The search features built into Search and Recover include:
- Custom Search: You can be selective about which folders and drives — whether hard drives or removable drives — you search.
- SmartScan: This speeds up the searching process by disregarding junk files that don’t need your attention.
- StrongScan: In searching areas many other data recovery tools can’t reach, you can potentially rescue even videos deleted years earlier.
Want to know how to recover a deleted video as well as protect it for the future with the same software? iolo’s System Mechanic Ultimate Defense can restore lost videos and prevent malware from deleting them in the first place.
