Before you begin the process of file recovery you should read a tutorial on how to undelete files. There are several available online. The point of this is to first determine if a machine or physical hard drive problem or a simple logic crash caused your problem. Of course if you know that you personally deleted the missing files you can skip this part of the how to recover deleted files lesson. Instead you can study the different types of file recovery platforms that exist. Very few file recovery programs come with a good set of instructions. As with most software the developers seem to think everyone else who uses their product was there when it was designed. You can also look for tutorials under how to undelete files. Files are often referred to as lost when they were actually deleted by the user. As with all things lost your files do indeed exist somewhere. As with the prior discussed tutorial the instructions on how to recover lost files center around making sure you approach the recovery process from the right angle. For example, when your computer will not start up because you are getting a windows error message stating that system files cannot be found, you will need a copy of a program to recover deleted files from a crashed hard drive. This is special file recovery software that can start your failed computer and will give you access to any files deleted or not. These programs do exist. They usually run your faulty PC from a disk drive. Or if you have accidentally deleted a few emails then you will run a quick scan over your hard drive with that same program but you will not need to reload Windows. There are dozens of different file recovery scenarios and a good tutorial on how to undelete files will address most of them.