Hard Drive Access

Okay....A friend has told me about when deleting something, it does not really get deleted.....Is this true? If this is, can someone tell me how I can get stuff I deleted back?

 

It's true windows doesn't actually erase files when you delete them. the data is simply left on the hard drive and ignored by windows. eventually you'll defragment or something that moves around data and replaces the old data. Other than that I can't give you any other advice, except that unless you really need the data, it's probably not worth the trouble to recover the data. you could also do a search and find some other threads that might help you.

 

Good idea, thank you....

 

Second things first -- if you're running Windows, have you checked out the Recycle Bin. That will usually let you recover anything you've deleted that hasn't been overwritten by something else -- if your Recycle Bin hasn't flushed it out because it was too old or needed the space for other things.

First things second -- as the_master_josh said, a deleted file doesn't get erased. The operating system just marks the space occupied by that file as available, and leaves it be. Eventually, the operating system will want that space for something else, and will write another file to that space. If there's lots of space still available on the drive, the deleted file may not be overwritten for quite some time.

the_master_josh also pointed out that recovery efforts aren't always easy. If it's been flushed from the Recycle Bin, it may still be on your hard drive, but finding it becomes quite difficult. (I don't know that it can be done with the tools that Windows provides, and I doubt it.)Recovery is harder still if the file was not written to contiguous clusters on your disk -- which is one reason to defragment your drive regularly. Even if the deleted file is in contiguous clusters, you'll probably need a sector editor to find the file and recover it. Using that tool needs care and expertise -- which is why Microsoft does not provide it with Windows. It's not hard to trash a disk with a sector editor if you don't know what you're doing.

 

Ummm i had this problem a while ago and tried all sorts of recovery tools and the best one i found was R-Studio. They do a FAT and a NTFS version. I manged to get quite a lot back although the MP3 music ones caused complications as say a folder containg a 14 track album was retrieved with any 14 tracks that was retreivable from the lost amount. So I ended with quite a jumble, but its worth a try. data recovery was a lot more succesful although progs did not return.