How to recover deleted files from an SSD drive

Shaant Minhas

hard drive

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Losing their critical data is a nightmare for professional as well as personal computer users. Even though a lot of us can nowadays avoid this fate with the advent of cloud storage, huge data loss episodes still aren’t unheard of.

In what follows, we’ll dive into the exact methods to recover your deleted files from SSD drives. So let’s get started.

How to recover deleted files from SSD drives

You can lose your files for a myriad of reasons; an abrupt shutdown, an abominable malware attack, or an accidental deletion are some of the most common ones. However, what has stayed the same over the years is how you can recover back your deleted files on your SSD drive.

Generally speaking, you can recover your lost Windows files through the Backup and Restore method of Windows. But this doesn’t always work. In cases like those, you’ll need some type of data recovery software that will retrieve the deleted data for you.

These data recovery software programs work by using complex algorithms that make sense out of your hard drive, find the location of deleted files, and then try to retrieve them. Now, there are a lot of such apps out there—some of them good, some of them outright bad. But mostly, all of them are quite similar and will get the job done easily.

I’d recommend you give the open-source apps the go first. For instance, PhotoRec and Kickass Undelete are good, popular apps that you can give a try.

However, if you can’t get your work done with them, then you’d probably need to give the paid, third-party ones a try. Again, you’ve a lot of options to pick from here. I recommend you go with Stellar Data Recovery; I’ve tried some of their tools in the past and have found them to be helpful. But I’ll reiterate that you don’t have to stick with only that—you have a dearth of options. Here’s a good list on from Handy Recovery, for instance.

For this article, however, we’ll stick with the open-source tools; we’ll be using the Kickass Undelete app here. To get started, download and install the app first.

kickass undelete

Now, when you launch the app, you’ll see all the local drives on your PC on the left-hand side. Choose the drive you want to recover your files from, and then click on the Scan button.

The scan will begin, and soon you’ll have all the deleted files of your drive in front of you, as illustrated by the example above. All you’ve to do to restore them then is to select the radio boxes and then click on Restore Files…

Do this and all of your lost files will be recovered one by one.

Recovering deleted files from SSD

Loosing your critical files can set you back in your work. Thankfully, nowadays, the Windows market is brimming with apps that can recover your files without any difficulties. So don’t hold back, and recover your files with any of the apps we’ve discussed above.