Undeluxe Home is a useful file protection tool that works just like the Recycle Bin - only better.

Under normal circumstances your Recycle Bin will only contain files that you've deleted from Explorer. Install Undeluxe, though, and the program will also protect files that are deleted in other applications, or at the command line. These then become visible in Undeluxe's "Protected Files Explorer" tool, and may be restored at any time.

To make sure this doesn't chew up too much of your hard drive space, the program will by default not try to protect files in your TEMP, Temporary Internet Files, or Cookies folders, amongst others. It further ignores temporary files that you're unlikely to care about (*.TMP, *.BAK and so on). And you can disable the protection on particular drives at a click, so customising the system to work according to your needs.

If you need more configuration options, consider upgrading to Undeluxe Professional. This allows you to define inclusion and exclusion filters describing the files you'd like to protect, so for instance you might have Undeluxe save only Word and Excel documents. You can also use minimum and maximum file sizes as filtering criteria. And there's even an option to protect files on remote network drives and volumes. It's yours for $34.95, and you can find out more at the Resplendence Software Projects site.

Version 2.00 adds support for Windows 8 and Windows Server, as well as fixing a few bugs.