Deleted File Recovery

You are doing a little routine cleanup of the hard drive, and it becomes apparent that you’ve accidentally deleted an important file.  What can be done?  Rest assured, the file has not been permanently deleted.  On the contrary, deleted file recovery is actually very simple in this day and age.  Deleted file recovery is usually no more complicated than simply downloading a small utility and allowing it to do all the work for you.  Even better, these highly useful utilities have the added advantage of being free.  That’s right, free.  Although there are commercial deleted file recovery programs, the best of the lot are actually free.

How can it be possible to recover a deleted file?  The simple answer is that a deleted file, in most cases, is not actually deleted.  Although this sounds completely contradictory, it’s actually the simple truth.  When a user clicks delete, the operating system makes a note of that and marks the file as deleted.  The underlying data, however, remains unchanged and sits on the hard drive.  To actually go through and delete a file would be inefficient.  The actual deletion of the file takes place when the operating system needs more room.  When this occurs, the operating system looks at this deleted section and attempts to overwrite it.  Before that actually occurs, the data remains completely secure and intact.

With a free software utility like Undelete or TestDisk, users can very easily perform deleted file recovery.  When a utility like TestDisk goes through a hard drive, it searches for “deleted” files that still have a measure of integrity.  The deleted file recovery program then tells the operating system to unmark that file as deleted, restoring it to use.  This entire process may take as little as a few minutes in most cases.

In more complicated situations, a RAW mode recovery may be required.  This kind of recovery mode allows the utility to scan the hard drive without any assistance from the hard drive.  RAW mode takes longer to work, but can pick out partially degraded files with ease.  After first running a normal scan, consider using RAW mode if the file you were searching for failed to show up on the first pass.

It is important that recovery be promptly attempted after a file has been accidentally deleted.  Waiting too long to perform the recovery will lead to a file that is corrupted, and more difficult to recover.  Although recovering at least some parts of a corrupted file is not impossible, it will be much more difficult to do.  Definitely avoid writing any new data until the deleted file recovery has been performed.  This will maximize your chances of recovering the lost data without damage.

Filed under: Hard Drive Recovery