How To Recover deleted files
Sometimes you accidently delete your
important files from your hard drive, but you don't have to panic as it
is easy to recover deleted files yourself. You can undelete and restore
files for sure as long as you have the best undelete software installed
and act immediately once you realize that your files are gone.
Here is how to restore deleted files using Windows PCs or Mac OS.
How files are deleted
When a file is deleted from the computer it is actually not deleted, but
rather it is simply removed from the directory in the folder. Although
you cannot see the file in the folder, contents of the file are still
intact at this point.
On Windows system, the file will have been moved to the Recycle Bin if
you deleted the file using Windows Explorer. If you are a Mac user, it
may have been moved to the Trash. In case of Linux, it would be Wastebin.
No matter what the bucket is called, the file can be restored as long as
a file remains in that place. Therefore, the first place to look at is
Recycle Bin/Trash/Wastebin if you would like to recover a deleted file
from your computer. If you deleted files using other methods such as
emptying the Recycle Bin, pressing Shift Delete when deleting files, or
deleted from within an application or other ways to bypassing the Bin,
then there is still a chance to recover files with no problem.
Even if you emptied the Recycle Bin or deleted files using other
methods, the file is still not actually deleted from the system. For the
operating system's viewpoint, the deleted file is no longer exists and
the space it occupied will become available for reuse by other files
soon. But the disk space won't get reused immediately, thus the data
contained in the deleted files will stay on the hard disk drive for some
time.
Chances of recovery
A deleted file can be undeleted or recovered right after it has been
deleted and for some time afterwards, because the operating system will
not reuse space from the deleted files immediately. But the chances of
perfect data recovery will decrease the longer you leave the situation,
as some or all of the space will be reused by the system eventually. The
chances of data recovery will also depend on how full the hard drive is.
Windows operating system will try to avoid reusing disk space that has
been recently freed, in order to give recovery software a better chance
of performing its task. But as the drive gets near to its full capacity,
there will be better chance of free space gets reused by other files
sooner. If you happen to defragment the hard drive since the file was
deleted, then this will seriously affect the chances of a file recovery
process. The free space left by deleted files will be occupied by
current files due to fragmentation process, making it much less likely
that undelete software could find anything useful.
Recovering deleted files
No operating system will provide any tool to recover deleted files as a
standard, so you would need to use 3rd party undelete software.
Undelete software will understand the internals of the operating system that was
used to store files on a disk and find exact location of the disk space that was
occupied once by a deleted file. As the space won't be reused immediately after
the file was deleted, there is still a very good chance of successful data
recovery using this software.
Undelete software for Windows
For Microsoft Windows users, there are third party tools available such
as Uneraser and Data Recovery Wizard. They are reported to use thorough
search mechanism and the most sophisticated data recovery algorithms to
provide best possible recovery rates. It can even restore files from
lost or corrupted partitions.
Saving the recovered data
One thing you must remember is that you should not write to the disk
that contains the files that you would like to recover, because if you
do so the space will be overwritten and the data will be lost. Instead,
you should save the files to a separate drive such as external drive,
network share or USB memory stick.
