TestDisk is primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses, or human error, such as the accidental deletion of partition tables. TestDisk detects numerous filesystem including NTFS, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS. It can also undelete files from FAT, NTFS, exFAT and ext2 filesystem.

PhotoRec is an additional included tool which is specifically designed to recover lost files including photographs (Hint: PhotographRecovery), videos, documents, archives from hard disks and CD-ROMs. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even with a re-formatted or severely damaged filesystems and/or partition tables.

Stuff I tell people when they delete files:

If the files were in fact deleted they can very likely be recovered. When an operating system "deletes" a file it doesn't actually tell the harddrive to write over that sector with 0s, but rather simply "forgets" that it had been storing files in that location. Then, at any point in the future if the system needs to store some new files (say windows update is running in the background) it will overrite the sections with old deleted files with new files. The more full your harddrive is the more likely this is. In general the first thing you should do if you realize you've deleted important files is fully turn off the computer. Hold the power button for 10-15 seconds to ensure it's completely turned off and not just in sleep or hibernate mode.

Next, you'll want to do one of two things. 1. Pay some local reasonable computer shop to attempt the following for you. Or 2. Do it yourself. You'll need to (from another computer) create a bootable flashdrive. You can make a linux mint or ubuntu. Basically just follow the instractions here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop until you get to the screen where it asks you to "try" or "install". Select try. Then once it's finished the tricky part begins.

Open a terminal (or calling jazzi or I for this portion haha). Run "sudo apt install testdisk". Then type lsblk to determine what your harddrive's named. It's probably un-named and thus defaults to /dev/sda. Then you can run "photorec" and if you're lucky it'll show a list of all media files you've recently deleted and you can plug in another flashdrive and save them onto it. Otherwise, you'll have to use the "testdisk" program itself as described here: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Undelete_files_from_NTFS_with_TestDisk