My brother told me to just delete everything older than 2 years and now I'm in a mess

He said I was overthinking it and that I'd never actually look at those old project files from 2019. I nuked like 300GB of stuff from my hard drive last weekend and now I need a specific invoice for a tax thing. Anyone know a good recovery tool that actually works for deleted files?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahcraig4d ago

Yeah that sucks. I used Recuva when I accidentally wiped a tax folder and it got back most of my stuff, just don't save anything new to that drive first.

zara_sanchez4d agoTop Commenter

Realize this is why we all hoard stuff now. Digital or physical, doesn't matter. We're all scared of that one random thing we might need someday. Funny how a tax receipt from 2021 becomes a treasure. I started keeping a "maybe delete" folder on my desktop. Stuff sits there for three months before I actually trash it. Gives my brain time to calm down and realize I really don't need it. Works way better than rushing into deletion when you're feeling overwhelmed.

wendy_henderson214d ago

Oh man, "you'll never actually look at those old files" - that's exactly what my brother in law told me before I deleted a whole folder of scanned receipts from 2021. Then of course the tax guy needed one of them six months later. For recovery, Recuva is decent if you haven't touched the drive much since. I'd also try PhotoRec, it's ugly but it digs deeper than Recuva for stuff that's been sitting there a while. Just make sure you save the recovered files to a different drive, not back onto the same one. And next time, archive stuff to an external drive instead of deleting, that's what I do now for anything older than a year.