Denver Data Recovery

That crumpling sound that the Recycle Bin makes when a file is deleted is usually a welcome reminder that more space has become available. In some cases, it can be a sudden reminder that you just deleted a very important file. This can happen very easily as users do a little Spring cleaning on their hard drives. With hard drive sizes reaching over a terabyte lately, it is easy to see how users can become confused. With a myriad of folders and drive volumes, keeping track of what is important can be confusing.

This is especially true when a computer may be shared, as is the case sometimes in a corporate or home LAN situation. Under these circumstances, the accidental deletion file becomes even more believable. When this happens to an important file, it can be very disconcerting. Days or perhaps months of work can be lost with just a few mouse clicks. Although regular backups would solve this issue to a large degree, this simply isn’t done in the majority of cases. Luckily, the ability to unerase data is not all that difficult. This seems almost magical to some users, but the power to unerase data can actually be found in a variety of free or inexpensive utilities.

How can a free program possibly bring back a file that has been deleted, even when it’s gone from the Recycle Bin? When a file gets deleted, it sticks around for a while, even if it’s not visible to the user. The operating system simply marks this file as eligible for overwriting. This may seem strange, but it is done to improve performance. Physically going through and erasing a file would be very inefficient and introduce unnecessary wear and tire on the hard drive. Instead, the operating system overwrites the file only when it needs more space.

This creates a window of time in which users may effectively unerase data. This window stays open only a short while, especially if the hard drive is asked to start writing data again. To give your lost files more time, avoid doing any kind of saving or creation of files. When a file has been lost, immediately begin the restoration process. If the file is extremely important, and the recovery utility must first be installed to work, consider doing this from another computer. Disconnect the drive, install the software on another computer, and connect the drive to the other computer. A tool like TestDisk can then scan the drive and unerase data.

This urgency is even more important if the hard drive in question is near its capacity. Any new file or data to be written will most likely end up overwriting the important file if hard drive space is low. To be safe, power down a computer if immediate recovery cannot be performed.

Filed under: Unerase Data