Windows Vista and later can optionally use its Volume Shadow Copy service to create snapshots of your hard drive. The Windows "Previous Versions" feature and other tools allow you to recover old versions of files and folders from these snapshots.

PreviousFilesRecovery is a little more specific, as it searches your shadow copies for files and folders which no longer exist on your hard drive.

If you know you've accidentally deleted a series of JPGs over the past few days, for instance, PreviousFilesRecovery may be able to find and recover them, even if undelete tools can't restore them from your hard drive.

Usage is straightforward. Set a starting folder, a subfolder depth and file mask (*, *.docx, pic*.jpg etc), and the program finds all the potential matches.

Select anything you'd like to restore, and it can be recovered to your chosen folder in a few seconds.