This is where you’ll run the File Recovery commands. You’ll see a Command Prompt window with Administrator access. Once it’s installed, open your Start menu and search for “File Recovery.” Launch the “Windows File Recovery” shortcut once and click “Yes” to the UAC prompt.

You can open the Store and search for “Windows File Recovery” or just click that link to open the Store. To get started, install the Windows File Recovery tool from the Microsoft Store to get started. We’ll explain which you should use and how to use them. The utility also has multiple modes intended for different situations and file systems. There are no guarantees here, and that’s why backups are so important. You can only get whatever data is still on the drive. If you’ve written a lot of data to a device like an SD card since you’ve deleted the file, it’s likely that the file’s data may have been overwritten.Įven if you manage to recover a file, you may only get some of the file’s data-the file may be corrupted. Whether Microsoft’s tool can actually find and recover a file you’ve deleted depends on the drive. Deleted files aren’t removed from hard drives immediately, but they often are removed from solid-state drives immediately. It doesn’t run on older versions of Windows. This tool requires you’ve installed Windows 10’s May 2020 Update or a newer version of Windows 10.

Windows file recovery