A friend of mine factory reset her computer on Windows 10, and lost an important document, so I'm wondering if there is a way for her to get it back, any help is useful.
I realize that a factory reset sets the computer back to it's original state of when it was first purchased, but I'm just curious if there are any free or cheap options available, besides going to a recover specialist.
Any advice would be nice - thanks!
Download the free version of Piriform Recuva. It is something I have used before for basic file recovery, and I don't know of a simpler GUI tool for Windows. Simply follow the instructions of this tutorial, or search for a simple video tutorial on YouTube if that is insufficient.
To maximize your chances of recovery reduce the amount of writes to the drive- setting it to read-only for example. Avoiding doing anything else while you attempt to recover the files is critical, newer files may silently destroy whatever is left of the older data. If at all possible you should attempt to boot from a drive or disk that doesn't contain the erased data, but if that is not possible/not something you know how to do then you may still be able to recover the data by booting the computer normally.