I mistakenly permanently deleted a large folder from my Win11 drive. Is there a way to recover it for free?
Thank you in advance.

 

Deleted comment (please remove)

 

Last edited: Dec 30, 2025 at 5:44 PM

My apologize. Wrong location?

 

there are many linux distros that can be booted from a flash drive with good recovery tools on them
I recommend https://www.system-rescue.org/

 

"you want isolate the drive so no new data is written to it but with SSDs you also need to make sure TRIM doesn't run on it."

Unzip the PURAN link to a USB stick/drive and try and recover the files to the same external stick/drive.

You don't want to write to the system disk that you deleted the folder from! keep it isolated and work & save to a different drive!

You could try :
https://www.puransoftware.com/File-Recovery-Download.html [FREE] (portable)
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva [FREE]

***edit*** if you have another laptop/pc, download HIREN's boot CD [FREE] and make a bootable USB stick with it. It has like 10 recovery programs on it. https://www.hirensbootcd.org/ Good Luck!

 

This is my kind of field.... but.... good answer my friend, fairly solid answer. Kudos to you.

 

Image the drive first, use the image to rescue the files, plan on large drive space.

 

Thank you all. I was able to recover most of the files. This saved me tons of time/work.

 

glad it was successful!

not to be pedantic, but as this was once my job I feel obligated to say:
data that only exists in one place is essentially already lost