I accidentally permanently deleted several important files and can’t find them in the Recycle Bin. I need help recovering the deleted files safely without overwriting any recoverable data.
Stop using that drive immediately. Don’t install recovery software, download files, or save anything to it, since new data can overwrite the deleted files. Run Disk Drill from another drive if possible, then restore anything found to a separate disk. Check cloud backups and File History first. If it’s an SSD with TRIM enabled, recovery may be limited, so valuable files are better left to a professional recovery service.
Don’t scan the original drive directly if you can avoid it. Make a sector-by-sector image onto another disk, then run Disk Drill against that image and save recovered files to a third location. That keeps the source untouched and lets you retry with different scan settings if the first pass misses anything.
Before you touch any software, right-click the folder those files lived in and check Restore previous versions. Windows keeps shadow copies sometimes, and if one exists you skip the whole imaging routine that @sam_react described. That imaging advice is solid for a mechanical drive, but honestly it’s overkill if your files were sitting in a synced folder like OneDrive or Dropbox, since the deleted versions often hang around online for a while. Disk Drill is a reasonable first pass once you’ve ruled the easy stuff out, just don’t expect miracles on an SSD, which @sys_egor68 already flagged. Figure out the drive type first. That one detail decides whether recovery is worth the effort or a coin flip.