Recycle bin??

Thank God my mother is my mother. She would never think of messing with anything of mine because she has always respected me as my own person. Just the other day she wanted some shoes of mine out of her way and instead of even going into my room she sat them at the door. And it's not just because i'm over 18 either, she's always treated me like that. Especially when it's something on the computer. I'll walk off so she comes up and is all "Woah, hey, what's this and what am I supposed to do to it to make it go away so it can be my turn?" Instead of being a twit and possibly deleting something of mine.

Thank God my parents give me the whole "Respect other people's property" speech once every 3 or 4 months. They're too smart to be messing with my stuff, especially since I've proven that I'm more than capable of bringing up past "life lessons" that they've supposedly taught me.

Yeah or back up on a hard drive or memory stick, even cd works fine.

zip disk FTW!

I always email myself my essays just in case

When I delete stuff, I do SHIFT+DELETE which means no time for recycle bin. That takes up space too so I avoid letting stuff build up there. So unless the computer wasn't used much (which would rearrange space) he might be in luck, but if there was a defrag involved then he's fucked for sure and since he 'cleaned up' I can assume that might have happened. FYL and your dads a dumbass for touching YOUR computer as you so stated. If it's yours then he needs to learn to leave it alone.

I don't have to worry about my parents, but I have 2 toddlers now that like to bang on the keyboard... When I do school (or anything important!) I insert my flash drive, do my work, save to desktop file AND flash drive, eject the flash drive, and store it in a safe place. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Prevents anything like this from happening!! I thought it was common knowledge to back up important documents, guess I'm just crazy...!

Yeah, that's a good one, it's also free. OP I know how you feel, been there before, but someone deleted my personal photos of my trip to Thailand.

System recovery restores everything program and setting wise but doesn't affect documents.