How to Restore a Quarantined File in Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender antivirus is a reliable choice to protect your Windows PC. It consistently scores high in AV tests, includes multiple scan options, and provides several extra tools. But that doesn’t mean it’s infallible and immune from alerting to false positives.
Here’s what to do if Defender quarantines a file you know to be safe.
Why Would Defender Quarantine a Safe File?
Microsoft Defender is generally good at not alerting to safe files. As long as the virus definitions are kept up to date (especially if you learnhow to manually update Windows Defender), false positives are rare. But they do happen.
Defender provides strong protection by being proactive and will quarantine potential threats, as well as active ones. Files are usually flagged as suspicious due to a mismatched or expired digital signature. It can also occur if the file has been incorrectly reported as dangerous.
How to Restore a Quarantined File in Defender
Suspicious files will usually be quarantined rather than automatically deleted. This means they’re put in a secure holding state so you can decide whether or not they should be deleted. However, in some situations, files confirmed to be infected will be deleted to protect your system.
You can find recently quarantined files in the Protection History.
To prevent the file from being flagged again, you could add it to the list of exclusions. You can find this option in the Virus & Threat Protection Settings. If you need more help, check out our guide aboutadding exclusions to Microsoft Defender antivirus.
How to Restore a Quarantined File Using Command Prompt
If you can’t access the Windows Security app, for some reason, you can restore quarantined files in Command Prompt (elevated).
If a file was quarantined because it was a potential network threat, you might be unable to restore it. This is usually because the system might no longer have the requirednetwork credentialsto access the file.
Restoring Files Quarantined by Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender is usually pretty good at spotting safe files among suspicious ones. But it might occasionally quarantine files that you know are safe. On those occasions, you can restore files in either Windows Security or Command Prompt.
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