A very disgruntled customer brought an Acer laptop to me. She had previously been infected by a virus and the shop she had taken her laptop to performed a factory restore to clear the problem.
Note: Only in extreme circumstances should a laptop require a factory restore because of a virus.
The shop had backed up her documents and photos but had not backed up the customers email settings or more importantly her Outlook 2010 data (.pst) files.
Recovery of her email settings was simply a phone call to her ISP which she had done but losing her business contacts and emails was disastrous.
I removed the hard drive from the laptop, put it in one of my external USB3.0 hard drive readers and after a two hour scan I recovered both of her Outlook files. I then imported them back into Outlook.
This entire process took about 5 hours and I charged her just £50. She said she would have paid four times that amount as the emails and contacts were so important to her business.
If you have accidentally deleted folders and files then please contact me and let me try and recover them.