DiskDigger is a powerful undelete tool that makes it easy to recover lost data.

The program is portable, so there's no installation required - it's very straightforward to use. Just run DiskDigger.exe, choose the drive you'd like to check, and in a couple of clicks the program will be scanning for deleted files.

DiskDigger is surprisingly fast, and very soon you'll have a complete list of everything that the program can recover. If this is a large hard drive then there might be thousands of files on the list, but fortunately you can filter this by file name and size (all jpegs that are at least 100KB, say). The program can display previews of some files, too, so it's usually straightforward to locate the data you need. Then just select your files, click the Restore button and DiskDigger will recover them.

If you find DiskDigger doesn't locate your missing documents, then you can always try a disk scan. This bypasses the file system and directly checks each drive sector, which can take considerably longer but will also recover files that can't be found in any other way. It's usually able to recover documents from drives that have been accidentally formatted, for instance (although this does depend on the formatting tool that was used).