Recover Deleted Files
Browsing through some files, you happen to notice a directory that has not been used for several months. This directory is taking up space, and has nothing important inside of it. Without thinking too much of it, you select the directory and hit delete. A few days later, you remember than important document was hidden inside of the folder. Quickly checking the Recycle Bin, you find that the contents have already been emptied. This is a scenario that can happen to even the savviest computer user.
What not every computer user may know, however, is that lost files such as these may still be on the hard drive. The ability to recover deleted files can be found online in numerous free utilities. Undelete Plus is one such free utility. When Undelete Plus scans a hard drive, it will display a list of the deleted files that can be recovered. With utilities like this, it is easy to recover deleted files. The key, however, is to act quickly. The sooner you can run a utility such as Undelete Plus, the better the chances are of being able to recover deleted files.
This may seem confusing to many computer users out there. How is it that a file can be recovered after it has been permanently deleted? The answer lies in the simple fact that the file is not actually deleted when the user presses “delete.” In order to provide maximum efficiency, computer designers decided to simply mark that section of data as free game once it is deleted. This means that although the data remains, the hard drive has been given permission to overwrite it at any time. Actually going through and physically deleting, or zeroing out, a section of memory would be inefficient. This is true only when special utilities are used to delete a file.
Because a deleted file may be overwritten at any time, it is important that the user act quickly to recover deleted files. Before the file is recovered, do not save or modify anything, as that may put the file at risk. Even if the user avoids any action, the operating system itself may perform a backup or other routine function that could imperil the file. As long as a user acts promptly to recover deleted files, the information should be safe.
The easiest way by far to safeguard information is to do frequent backups. Although utilities like Undelete Plus have a high success rate, it is safer to make backups to a location outside of their normal storage place. Buying an external hard drive specifically to make backups with could be a worthwhile investment if you are worried about the safety of your valuable information. Hard drive failures can occur to disks both young and old.
Filed under: Recover Deleted Files