Read this article to find out what to do if an antivirus removed important data by mistake. How to restore files that Avira recognized as viruses and placed them into the quarantine or removed? Recovering files deleted by mistake from the quarantine of an antivirus program.
Introduction
One of the most frequently applied methods to infect or infiltrate a user’s device in order to damage it is using malware, or viruses, to help hackers attain their goal.
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To combat such malware, specialized antivirus software is developed, its primary task being to ensure comprehensive protection of a computing device and user data in real-time mode. On the Internet, you can find numerous offers of antivirus products to protect you from various threats. However, the actual list of the developers whose products feature a set of protective options offering full-fledged protection from infiltration, infection, theft, hacking and other malicious activity, and possess a large database of identified and isolated threats, and who are constantly working to improve their algorithms is only limited to a few well-known names. One of them is Avira, which is rightfully recognized as one of the best security tool developers and takes the leading position for the quality of protection, performance and ease of use.
The company’s antivirus products ensure complete integrity of data and protection from any malicious influence, and they offer a comprehensive set of measures to guarantee uninterrupted operation of computing devices. To achieve this goal, Avira antivirus solutions can isolate specific threats, which can be examined and sent to the company’s lab for analysis, or remove infected elements if they cannot be cured. When a user discovers that a specific file containing important data was hidden or removed by an antivirus program, looking for possible ways of restoring such file becomes an urgent issue. In today’s article, we’ll examine main antiviral solutions by Avira and offer working methods to find and restore data lost because of the antivirus activities.
Why it is important to use an antivirus
The importance of securing integrity of user data, creating a safe environment for computing devices and ensuring protected access to local and global networks cannot be overestimated.
To increase the speed of processing information resources and accessing data, directly or remotely, at any time, the major part of all data is now offered in a digital format and located physically in various internal or external storage devices. This method of storing information lets us process and exchange huge amount of data which makes it all the more attractive for end users.
However, keeping everything electronic has its disadvantages too – for example, information can be lost after a breakdown of the storage device or a software failure. One of the main threats to safe use and storage of data includes harmful effects of various malware or infection with viruses, which can be used to damage a device remotely or commit other illegal actions.
The list of possible problems involved can be quite long. The main common feature is that any unauthorized intrusion to a computing device may have dire consequences. A virus infestation can result in both temporary trouble like advertising or joking messages popping onto the screen, and serious problems related to identity theft, stealing confidential information, blocking access to the operating system, physical damage to the hardware, or remote use of someone’s device for illegal purposes.
Viruses can incapacitate both individual computing devices and even entire local workgroups within a single network, or knock out hundreds of infected devices all over the world via the Internet. Information on infected computing devices can be damaged, corrupted, overwritten, erased or encrypted which requires much effort and financial expenses on the users’ part to improve the situation.
Using trusted antivirus software is a primary requirement if you want to protect computing devices from all kinds of malicious activities. Updating the antivirus regularly and keeping its virus signature file up to date allows to secure computing devices against virus infestation and critical loss of data almost completely.
Recovering infected files that were removed by mistake
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The ability of antiviruses to detect various threats, prevent your devices from harmful effects of malware, and block infected objects adds to the total security of a computing device and all of the user data.
However, as malware grows smarter in its attempts to infiltrate protected devices, antiviruses often try to predict possible methods that malware may be using and block any activity that seems suspicious. Also, if an infection is already inside and tries to infect the device, or activities of some files evoke well-founded suspicions in the antivirus, it will remove the detected threat by placing it into the protected storage area, in accordance with the internal security rules and the corresponding algorithm. Otherwise, it can completely remove the malicious object from the memory of your device if guaranteed blocking is impossible.
When malware (files or apps) is placed into the quarantine, it will be isolated from the operating system and encrypted, therefore unable to do any harm to your device. That is why malware can be stored in the quarantine for an unlimited period of time. The quarantine keeps the computing device safe from any effects of the blocked malicious code and gives the user a chance to check if these elements are harmful or they were deleted by mistake.
As soon as a file or application is recognized as harmful, you should remove it from the quarantine with the help of a corresponding tool. When deleted, the infected object will be removed from the operating system. If the file turns out to be safe, you can restore it to its original location easily.
If the file you are looking for cannot be found in the quarantine of your antivirus, you may need to use a third-party file recovery tool to get it back. Below, we will consider two scenarios in recovering files: from the quarantine of the antivirus and with a specialized program, Hetman Partition Recovery.
Recover deleted files from the quarantine of an antivirus
Open Avira and click on the Quarantine tab in the left panel.
In the protected storage window, you can see a table showing all threats placed into the quarantine. Find the necessary file, select it and click on the Restore button, which you can see above the file list.
The selected file will be immediately restored to its original location where it was before being removed.
Sometimes infected or suspicious objects get removed immediately due to certain internal settings. If that’s the case, the quarantine will be empty.
To make sure the antivirus is configured to move infected objects to the quarantine, open the settings window by clicking on the gear-shaped icon in the lower left corner.
In the left-side menu, select System Scanner, then Scan and in the tab Action on detection make sure that the selected option is Interactive. In this case, the default action after the system scan will be Quarantine. Otherwise, when choosing Automatic the Primary action option should also be Quarantine.
Additionally, you can configure exceptions which the antivirus will ignore when running the scan. In the left-side menu, choose Real-Time Protection and select the tab Exceptions, and in the right panel, add a specific executable file of any program, or specific files and folders, at your discretion, to the corresponding field.
Use the button Add to set required exceptions that will be shown in a special window each.
When you are finished with configuring, click Apply and ОК to confirm the changes in the settings and apply them.
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