Accidentally Deleted Files

Many computer users are under the assumption that when they delete a file that it is gone forever. However, that is not always the case. Infact, depending on how much additional data has been written to the drive since the file was deleted, it can almost always be recovered. In Mac operating systems this gets a little more complicated, and sometimes after files are deleted on those systems, they are indeed gone, and the very best you can hope for is to carve the data out. On Windows based systems though, the blocks containing the files are only marked as empty, which then tells the operating system that it can write new data to those blocks. If data is written to the blocks that have been marked as empty, then the file will be effectively overwritten and cannot be recovered at that point.

There is some debate, albeit very little, that overwritten data can be recovered. There are respected members of the industry that feel if you were to examine the platters under an electron microscope you could still see fragments of data that had been overwritten. This may be true, but unless you have literally decades of your life to dedicate towards recovering a single, very small piece of data using this method, it's pretty safe to say that the data is gone. The simple fact remains that if a file is deleted and the sectors that contained fragments of that file are overwritten, then the file is gone, and cannot be recovered. Even when we wipe drives for our customers, we are basically writing data to each sector to insure that the original data is gone for good. That is the same method the Department of Defense uses when wiping drives in order to secure their data. So the simple fact remains, files that are deleted can be recovered until those files are overwritten in some form or fashion.

If your data has been accidentally deleted, it's vitally important that you don't use the drive any longer. Even when doing something as simple as web browsing, you run the risk of overwriting your data since your browser stores web page data in a cache, and the operating system may see sectors that contain your lost data as a good place to store these files. So if you have deleted important data, it's imperative that you contact a data recovery professional to get your data back. At ACS Data Recovery all of our recovery methods start out by putting your drive in a "write protected" mode which prevents any data from being written to your drive. We then image the drive, and perform all recovery work from that image. For more information please call 1-800-717-8974 and we'll be happy to help you.