Recovering Your Lost or Deleted Files can be a life-saver, especially when all hope is lost in getting that very important file(s). You delete a file from your hard drive, it gets dumped into the Recycle Bin, and later you need same file, you go to the Recycle Bin and restore it back. This process is understandable because it is likened to a real-life situation where you dump an item into your waste bin and if you need it again, you can go back to the waste bin and pick it up.
But what if you delete the file from the Recycle Bin just like a Waste Collector coming around to pick up your trash with the discard item in it? Definitely, you can’t recover that item again but that’s not how it works with hard drives. The file you deleted from the Recycle Bin can be recovered.
When you delete a file, it isn’t really erased – the pieces of data that makeup the file continues to exist on your hard drive, even after you empty it from the Recycle Bin or formatted the hard drive. This allows you (and other people) to recover files you though you’ve deleted.
Watch this tutorial on how to recover files with Easeus Data Recovery Wizard
If you are not careful, this will also allow other people to recover your confidential files, even if you think you’ve deleted them. This is a serious concern when you’re disposing of a computer or hard drive.
If you’re wondering why your computer doesn’t just erase files when you delete them, it’s actually pretty simple, deleting the file’s reference (or pointer) and marking its space as available is an easy and fast operation, compared to erasing the file by erasing it’s data which takes longer time. For example, if you’re deleting a 10 gigabytes file, that would be instantaneous. To actually erase the file’s contents, it may take several minutes – just as long as if you were writing 10 gigabytes of data to your hard drive.
Windows doesn’t include a built-in tool that scans your hard drive for deleted files, but there are a wide variety of third-party tools that do this. Easeus Data Recovery Wizard is a good option. Easeus Data Recovery Wizard can scan a hard drive for deleted files and allow you to recover them even after the drive has been formatted.
If you’ve accidentally deleted a file and need to recovery it, there are some things you should consider:
- You should recover the file as soon as possible: Windows continues to write files to your hard drive and the chances of it overwriting the deleted files increases. If you want to be sure you can recover the file, you should perform a recovery immediately.
- You should try to use the hard drive as little as possible: If you try to recover a file by installing a file-recovery software on the same hard drive, the installation process and normal use of the hard drive can overwrite the file.
