[SOLVED] How To Recover Files Deleted By Virus Attack | Guide [MiniTool Tips]

Maybe you have ever heard of computer virus, but never have a chance to experience it. Believe us, encountering virus is a fairly common occurrence. According to statistics, more than half of the computer users have the experience of being attacked by virus and some of them are even frequently bothered by it, failing to get rid of this issue.

Definitely, the most annoying thing during virus attack is claimed to be struggling to recover files deleted by virus attack.

Imagine this: your presentation files, which were planed to show in the company meeting the next day are totally lost from computer when virus is detected, how depressed you will be. These files may be finished after days of or even months of hard work. Besides, the lost files could be the symbol of people’s past good days, which may include an unforgettable memory of deceased friend. That means, the file is unique, it can never be recreated again.

Certainly, users who lose important data and are not willing to accept this fact and will try their best to recover missing files after virus attack at any cost.

How to Recover Files Deleted by Virus Attack

In this part, I will introduce two commonly used way to help you with files recovery after virus attack.

Recover Lost Files after Virus Attack with Third-party Tool

I feel it’s really necessary to introduce an effective and easy way to help you regain your lost files after getting attacked by virus. That is to recover files with MiniTool Power Data Recovery, a piece of powerful third-party tool that has been used and praised by tens of thousands of people.

I’ll show you how to finish the recovery work in two different situations.

Situation 1: the computer works fine after virus attack.

The common issue is that some files, including text files, photos, audio files and videos are missing after your computer has been invaded by virus. And it’s often too late when you have finally detected it. The needed files may get lost without a warning and users got no way to cancel such deletion performed automatically by virus.

In this case, I strongly suggest you to follow this tutorial to recover virus deleted files from PC.

Step 1: download, install and run MiniTool Power Data Recovery as soon as possible to start recovery (please remember not to install this software to the drive which has been attacked by virus and included files waiting to be recovered).

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Step 2: the main interface will appear and you need to choose a suitable option from the left-hand panel. You should figure out which is the most suitable one for your case.

• “This PC” should be selected if you need to recover data from existing partitions.
• “Removable Disk Drive” should be chosen to get back files from a removable disk.
• “Hard Disk Drive” is suitable for data recovery from a hard disk (internal and external).
• “CD/DVD Drive” can be used to retrieve files from damaged CD/DVD.

FYI: WD External Hard Drive Data Recovery Is Easy Enough.

Step 3: after that, please select the disk or partition to scan (by clicking on the “Scan” button) in order to find lost but needed files.

Step 4: when the scan processes, there will be more and more files found by the software and shown to you. At this time, you need to do two things:

• One is to look through the files to find and select needed ones.
• The other is to press the “Save” button in the lower right corner to set a new storage location for those selected files.

After all those steps are finished, you will see a prompt in software, indicating that the recovered work has been done and users are allowed to close the software right away.

Please read this if you are curious about how to recover files deleted permanently on Windows:

[SOLVED] How To Recover Permanently Deleted Files In Windows

Learn the steps to recover permanently deleted files in Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista after 'shift-delete' or 'empty recycle bin'.

Read More

Situation 2: the computer refuses to boot after virus attack.

A more serious problem is that the operating system becomes unbootable after the virus attack. This may happen because virus has damaged the OS, deleted essential boot files or changed the boot settings.

No matter what the reason is, the result would be – you are no longer allowed to enter your own computer by booting from the operating system you often use, so you totally lose access to your files saved on that hard drive, no matter it’s for work, for study or for entertainment, all gone.

If you run into operating system not found or other problems that result in a non-bootable computer, you can’t use the previous method to recover files. But the exciting news is that there’s a bootable edition of MiniTool Power Data Recovery, which can help you access the internal hard drive without booting operating system.

How to do the recovery:

1. Firstly, you need to build a bootable CD/DVD/USB disk successfully on another computer.
2. Then, you should disconnect the boot disk from that computer and connect it to the target computer which needs recovery.
3. After that, you should restart the computer to enter BIOS and set it to boot from this CD/DVD0/USB drive, not the local drive.
4. Finally, you should repeat the step 2 ~ step 4 mentioned in the previous method to recover the data you need.

Please read part 2 of Data Recovery From Corrupted Internal Hard Disk – Ultimate Guide to know the following things clearly:

• How to make a boot disk by using the snap-in WinPE Bootable Builder included in an advanced edition of Power Data Recovery.
• How to boot from the disk you’ve made so as to enter the main interface of Power Data Recovery.

Recover Files Deleted by Virus Attack with Microsoft Solutions

In many ways the virus can attack on our computer and other kinds of data storage devices like USB flash drive. And when the virus is activated, it will start to delete files and ruin our OS. If any Windows 7 users discovered this, the first thing they should think of is how to recover deleted files and folders in Windows 7. Retrieving missing files could be a breeze, can you imagine that?

Actually, there’re lots of practical ways for you to find and recover Windows files (take Windows 7 as an example). Now, I’ll talk about two ways that Microsoft Windows provide.

Way 1: restore from a backup.

If you can’t find a file on your computer when you need it or you just performed an accidental deletion to the needed file, you may restore it from a backup (under the premise that they’re enabled Windows backup before).

Here’s how to do to retrieve missing files in Windows 7 by using the Windows backup:

1. Click on the Start button from the bottom left corner of computer screen and choose “Control Panel”.
2. Choose “System and Security” from above interface and then click “Backup and Restore” from the following page.
3. Now, choose “Select another backup to restore files from” or “Recover system setting or your computer” to finish recovery under guidance.

Way 2: restore previous versions.

You can also try to restore files from previous version. What does this mean? Maybe most of you don’t know the hidden function of Windows – “Restore previous versions”.

To be honest, the previous versions are the copies of files and folders that saved by Windows itself automatically. When you find files in your computer hard disk are lost, you can try to restore the certain drive or folder to its previous versions, in which files are still there.

There’s a fabulous folders recovery tool for you.

Here’s how to do the recovery by relying on previous version:

Step 1: get access to the computer hard drive through following two ways.

• One is clicking on Start button from the bottom left corner of computer screen and choosing “Computer”.
• The other is double clicking on “Computer” icon on desktop.

At this time, if users want to recover deleted folder from D drive, they could right click on D drive to see a pop-up menu, in which many options like “Open”, “Open in new window” and “Turn on BitLocker…” are included.

Step 2: find “Restore previous versions” option and choose it to continue.

Step 3: After seeing a list of available previous versions of files and folders, you should choose a favorable restore point to start recovering folder.

But the way, if you want to recover lost files after virus attack from a folder, you should do the following things:

1. Enter the certain drive that included target folder before virus attack.
2. Afterwards, navigate to the folder that was used to save the needing files.
3. And then, right click on it and choose “Restore previous versions” to complete the recovery.

Please note the following things:

• Before restoring a file or folder to its previous version, you are suggested to select a certain previous version, and then click Open to view it in order to make sure that this is the version you actually need.
• But remember, you can’t open or copy previous versions of files and folders that were created by Windows Backup. The only thing you can do is to restore them.
• After you clicked on the “Restore” to restore files from a previous version, the current version will be replaced on computer. What’s more, the replacement can’t be cancel. So please think twice before you really do this.

This tells how to Backup and Restore in Windows 10.

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Kill Virus for Security Concerns

In today’s era, where information and science is well developed, almost everyone is aware of the danger of virus and the importance of killing virus. But do you really know what time is the best time to kill virus?

The Best Time to Kill Virus

Knowing that virus may further ruin the data and operating system after its invasion, most of you think it would be better to kill virus as soon as you can by using powerful antivirus tools.

However, I don’t suggest you to do so. On the contrary, I recommend that you try every means you can to recover files deleted by virus attack firstly before performing any other operations.

Why don’t I suggest you to kill virus before retrieving missing files? The reason is easy-to-understand: antivirus programs may delete some useful files from your computer when removing virus for you. And this may cause secondary damage, deleing more files from computer and making some data gone for good.

As a result, I suggest you to complete data recovery before they adopt antivirus programs to clean disk, unless the files deleted by virus are of no use.

Here are ransomeware prevention tips for you.

How Virus Enter Your Computer and Ruin Data

With the development of internet, the risk of being attacked by virus boosts. When you click on links sent from untrusted sites or in an anonymous email, you are actually giving way to the hidden computer virus.

There are other actions that are dangerous and may let computer virus invade your OS:

• Use pirated or unknown software/programs/applications.
• Use a new movable device on computer without checking security or killing virus.
• Continue visiting sites on which virus or abnormal operations are detected.
• Download files from network casually, even from unknown sites.

In fact, virus can get into our personal computer through plenty of new ways that you couldn’t think of. That’s why most users would like to roll up their sleeves and start to install a trusted antivirus program when they buy a new computer or reinstall the OS. After the virus entered computer, they may not be activated right away.

Virus Comes with Storage Media

In theory, viruses are attached to storage media like floppy disk and hard disk so as to constitute infection source and the transmission medium is decided by work environment. Virus is put into memory after invasion and the virus creator has already set up the trigger condition, which is diverse. It could be the clock, system date, user identifier or a system communication. When the condition becomes ripe, virus will start replicating itself to infected object and performing various sabotage activities, including:

• Destroying file system
• Changing file name
• Deleting data

Definitely, to recover files deleted by virus attack becomes an urgent thing.

The Volume Does Not Contain A Recognized File System - How To Fix?

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Verdict

All in all, computer virus is more than just a data killer since it actually can cause serious problems to users’ disk and system. Computer virus is for computer what biological virus is for human body. It can put all of us in a tight spot, letting us worry about the ruin of hard work, the loss of unforgettable memory, financial losses, etc.

But you shouldn’t kill virus immediately after getting attacked since this is a dangerous action to your data. You should finish deleted or corrupt files recovery firstly and then do other things you like, such as cleaning the virus.

Recover Files Deleted by Virus Attack FAQ