It depends on where the files are located.
If the files are on a removeable memory card, it’s easy! Just shut down the phone, remove the memory card, plug the card into a PC’s card reader and use any of the gazillion free and paid file-recovery tools available. (Examples.)
No card reader? You can buy one for under $10. (Examples.)
(As an aside, note that this — very easy file access/recovery/transfer —
is one of the better, but lesser-discussed, benefits using externally-upgradable storage in a phone. It can make it much easier to manage, transfer, or salvage photos, music, and other files that normally live on/in your phone.)
If the files are on the phone’s internal storage, you may be out of luck. Although you usually can view and copy/move a phone’s files via the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) just by plugging the phone into a PC via USB, that’s usually not enough for file-recovery software to work: they need lower-level access than MTP provides.
At the least, you’ll probably have to turn on Android’s USB debugging mode; an option that allows for some kinds of lower-level access. USB debugging is one of Android’s normally-hidden Developer options; here’s how to access them. (A word of warning — it’s a funky process!)
If Windows can then mount the phone as an external drive (that is, if Windows can assign the phone a drive letter), you may be able to use normal PC-based file-recovery tools, as mentioned above.
But this mostly works on older phones, which could present themselves as a Mass Storage Class (MSC) device — same as a flash drive — when connected to a PC via USB. Newer phones mostly don’t do this because, to mount the phone as a Windows drive, it has to be unmounted in Android; disabling the phone. There were instances of phones being bricked by this, back in the day; which is why newer phones generally don’t offer MSC access.
You also can try third-party PC-based Android-file-recovery software, such as Easeus Mobisaver (free and paid versions available). But those tools aren’t magic: If your phone/PC setup doesn’t allow some kind of low-level access to your phone’s internal storage, the tools won’t be able to do anything.
So, you don’t have many options now. But for easiest possible future file recovery on Android, think about using a cloud-based backup service, so that copies of your most-important files will be stored somewhere off the phone; and/or placing all your most valuable files on add-on, plug-in memory cards.
Related: Only buy phones that allow for such expandable, add-on storage! 🙂
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I followed you years ago, but lost contact. So glad to find you and hope you do start a newsletter