How to Recover Files Deleted by McAfee

Have you downloaded a piece of software or an archive only to watch McAfee remove it without asking? Or maybe you tried to open a file, and McAfee flagged it as dangerous before it vanished from your system.

These situations happen more often than you think. Our team has dealt with this problem in various contexts and compiled simple, tested methods to help you recover McAfee-deleted files and, just as importantly, how to stop it from erasing files you trust again.

How to Recover Files Deleted by McAfee

So, as you see, there are two ways to restore files deleted by McAfee. The approach depends on McAfee’s actions—whether the file was deleted outright or stored in quarantine. First, we’ll cover files that were fully deleted, either immediately after detection or removed from quarantine. We’ll tackle this first because our internal statistics show that most people are dealing with “true” deletions and not quarantine cases.

Method 1: Recover McAfee Deleted Files Using Data Recovery App

There are plenty of data recovery apps to choose from, and you can check our list of the best data recovery options, based on our tests. For this example, we’ll use Disk Drill—it’s one of the best apps of its kind, that constantly earns high marks for its recovery performance and is incredibly beginner-friendly. The recovery process usually takes just a couple of clicks and is pretty intuitive.

Here’s how to use Disk Drill to restore files deleted by McAfee:

1. Download Disk Drill from the official website. Once the download is complete, install and launch the program.
2. On the home screen, you’ll notice your primary as well as all other storage drives connected to your PC. Select the drive/partition you want to perform recovery on.
3. Click on Search for lost data to scan your storage for lost files.
4. Disk Drill will scan the storage for all lost files. You don’t need to wait for the scan to finish, as you can click on Review found items at any time and let the scan run in the background. Files will pop up in the list as Disk Drill finds them.
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   Disk Drill comes packed with features that make finding your files easy. You can filter recoverable files by type, size, or date modified. The search bar lets you type part of the file name or the full name to locate it faster. You can also search by file extension, like exe, dll, or zip/rar, which are commonly flagged as suspicious by antivirus programs.

5. Next to each file, you’ll see its recovery chances marked as High, Average, or Low. From our experience, these ratings are usually accurate and give you a good sense of whether the file can be restored. Files with “High” chances are typically intact and easy to recover.
6. You can also use the search bar to filter files by name to find them easily. You can also use it to find files with a specific file extension. Since we’re recovering video files, we’ll search for “.mp4”.
7. You can also see the probability of a successful recovery next to each file.
8. Find and select the files you want to recover. Then, press the Recover button to continue.
9. Lastly, choose a destination for your recovered files and complete the recovery process. Like with the installation, make sure to pick a different drive or partition than the one you scanned (if possible).

Disk Drill, in its Basic version, lets you scan and preview as much as you want, but the actual recovery is limited to 500MB. For many cases, like small files McAfee might have mistakenly flagged and deleted, this limit could be enough. If you need more, you can always upgrade to the PRO version, which removes all limits.

Recovery of certain types of files, like .exe, which antivirus programs often delete, depends heavily on the integrity of the file system. Recovery works if the file system records are intact. If the file system is too damaged for that, the software will rely on a signature scan to identify the files. However, files like .exe are usually hard to detect—or even impossible—using this method, as their structures are more difficult for signature-based scans to identify accurately.

Now your deleted files are back, but that’s not the end of the story. McAfee can still flag and delete the same file during the next scan. To prevent this, go to I’ve Got My File Back—How Do I Stop McAfee from Quarantining It Again? and find out how to stop it from happening again.

Method 2: Retrieve Files From McAfee Quarantine

If instead of straight-up deletion, McAfee has restricted your files to a secured location, you can recover those quarantined files from within the McAfee app itself.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your McAfee Antivirus software and click on the three-dot icon on the left side of your screen.
2. Now, go to My Protection, located under the Home icon.
3. In the My Protection menu, navigate to Quarantined Items.
4. Now, all you have to do is select the files from the quarantine manager you want to recover and click on Restore. We didn’t have any files in the quarantine section, so our screen might look different. But it may show some files on your end.

Just like with Method 1, your files are now back where they were before, but this isn’t the end of it. As McAfee warns: “The same file or app might be detected again as a potential threat when it is next accessed.” Keep reading—we’ll explain your options from here.

I’ve Got My File Back—How Do I Stop McAfee from Quarantining It Again?

So, your files are back, but that’s just the first step. Without further action, McAfee might flag and quarantine them again during the next scan. To stop this from happening, you’ll need to whitelist the file. It will give your file a quarantine exemption, so McAfee won’t automatically delete it again.

Here’s how to achieve this:

1. Launch McAfee Total Protection and click on the side-panel button.
2. Now go to My Protection.
3. Here, select Real-Time Scanning.
4. You will notice a section called Exclude Files. This option will allow you to add files to a list, and that list won’t be put through the antivirus scan. Click on Add File to continue.
5. Now, select a file and click on Open.
6. Your file has been successfully added to the quarantine exemption list.

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