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We've all deleted files we didn't mean to. Don't Panic! It's usually very easy to recover them.

Imagine, for a minute, that you're clearing out all the magazines in your home. You find the ones you've read, and toss them in the bin. Or into a bag that you are going to take to the recycling centre. Then you remember that you actually wanted to keep one particular issue. What are you going to do?

It's highly unlikely that you'll run around your home in panic, wringing your hands in despair. You'll probably check amongst the magazines you've kept, to make double sure you haven't thrown it out. Then, if it's not there, you'll go to the bin or the bag where you put all the stuff, and fish it out again. Simple.

On a computer, it's no different.

Everything you delete goes into a computer bin. Look for the little trashcan symbol on your desktop. Open up the trashcan in the same way you'd open up a desktop link to your programs, and you'll get a full list of everything you've recently deleted. Find the file you want, and drag it out again. Pulling it onto your desktop is fine; from there you can find the folder where it usually lives and drag it in there again.

If you deleted an email by accident, that doesn't go into desktop bin. That goes into the special email bin. Just look down your list of options for something that says Deleted Items or similar. Open up that, and look for the email you deleted. Drag it out and back into your Inbox. Easy!

Now, sometimes it happens that you're writing an email or a document, you click something by mistake, and oops! It's gone!

The good news is, it probably isn't. You probably just did the equivalent of putting a pile of magazines on top of it.

Very few computer users look at their screens properly. People tend to look in the middle, where the action is, and not around the edges, where things are staying out of the way until you need them. If you could print your screen onto paper, and read it normally, you would be surprised at all the things you've never seen before! So, the first thing you have to do when something vanishes, is look at your screen carefully.

Especially look along the bottom. You'll see a whole lot of little pictures and tabs. One of them may just have the missing document or email attached to it. If you can't read the tab names clearly, just click on them one by one until the missing one comes up. If it's an email that went missing, also look in email options called Drafts or Sent Items. Sometimes we send things

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