We’ve all had that sinking feeling in our stomachs: you had important files in the recycle bin and you deleted them! Many people give up and recreate the files by hand, which can take days or more of hard work, depending on the file type. More than anything, you just wish you hadn’t done that.

There are ways to recover deleted files from the recycle bin, however. Even if you’ve already emptied it, you can use specialized data recovery programs to retrieve deleted files from the depths of your hard drive. Why bother recreating something that’s already there?

ParetoLogic’s Data Recovery is one such data recovery program. It works because the file isn’t actually erased from your hard drive until it’s overwritten. While freeware programs often overwrite that data and permanently destroy it rather than recovering it, Data Recovery retrieves the information for you.

Data Recovery scans for files that can be recovered, then gives you the choice of which ones to recover. Within a few minutes, you could recover hundreds of files from the void of the recycle bin. If you don’t want to retrieve everything that was in the recycle bin, Data Recovery will even allow you to choose which files you want. If you’re not sure which file it was, you can search the text of files to find out. Then, you save the files to the location of your choice and celebrate the return of your files!

If you deleted files that are important for sentimental or business reasons, don’t take hours or days to recreate them, if that’s even possible (photos of once-in-a-lifetime events can’t be recreated). Time is money, and that money is better spent on a program that you can use for years to come, whenever you find yourself accidentally deleting a crucial file.