r/computerforensics

This is where all non-forensic data recovery questions should be asked. Please see below for examples of non-forensic data recovery questions that are welcome as comments within this post but are NOT welcome as posts in our subreddit:

1. My phone broke. Can you help me recover/backup my contacts and text messages?

2. I accidently wiped my hard drive. Can you help me recover my files?

3. I lost messages on Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook, ect. Can you help me recover them?

Please note that your question is far more likely to be answered if you describe the whole context of the situation and include as many technical details as possible. One or two sentence questions (such as the ones above) are permissible but are likely to be ignored by our community members as they do not contain the information needed to answer your question. A good example of a non-forensic data recovery question that is detailed enough to be answered is listed below:

"Hello. My kid was playing around on my laptop and deleted a very important Microsoft Word document that I had saved on my desktop. I checked the recycle bin and its not there. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 with a 256gb SSD as the main drive and has Windows 10 installed on it. Is there any advice you can give that will help me recover it?"

After replying to this post with a non-forensic data recovery question, you might also want to check out r/datarecovery since that subreddit is devoted specifically to answering questions such as the ones asked in this post.