Recover Deleted Files

The ABC's Of File Storage

Much like a file cabinet, data is stored on your hard drive in sections on a disk drive (called "sectors"). Every time you click "Save As" in the application that opens up the photo of your dog, or in the program you use to create your monthly budget, that file is written to an area of the hard disk. Each stored file has a "pointer" assigned to it. These pointers are used by the operating system to locate where that piece of data resides on the hard drive.

After the inadvertent deletion of a file, recovery is possible because it is the pointer to the file that gets trashed when you hit "delete", and not the actual data. But you have to act quickly to increase your chances of recovering a deleted file. If the operating system sees unused space, it may decide to store another file in the same location.

File Recovery First Aid

On Windows systems, the easiest way to recover an accidentally deleted file is to use the Recycle Bin, the purgatory of deleted files. After deletion, this is (usually) where the file resides. Simply open up Recycle Bin, click on the file you want to restore, and from the left-hand menu select "Restore this item". Your file will be restored back to its original location on the hard drive. You can also just right-click on the item you want to put back into place and click on "Restore". On a Mac, a similar feature is available only it's called "Trash". Open the Trash icon, select the item to restore and click on the "Put Away" option. (But wouldn't "Put Back" make more sense? Anyway...) It's kind of like traveling back in time.

One exception to this "Deleted file goes to Recycle Bin" rule is when you use the DEL command from a DOS command prompt. Files deleted from the DOS prompt are just deleted, with no second chances. It's the same thing that happens when you empty the Recycle Bin or the Trash folder. The file pointer is deleted, and the space occupied by that file is marked as unused.

File Recovery 911

But there are various utilities available to recover deleted data, even data emptied from the Recycle Bin. Some of them are even free to download. One of the most popular for Windows is Restoration. One word of caution, though, this program will find just about everything that you've ever deleted from your PC, including files deleted from program uninstalls, so if you know the extension (DOC, MP3, etc.) of the file that you deleted, narrow your search to only files with that extension. Once you find your file select it, and then click on "Restore by Copying." If you have a file on your hard drive with the same name, make sure to save the restored file on an alternate drive, CDROM, floppy or flash disk so that your currently saved file is not overwritten!

Of course, Restoration is free, so there are no guarantees in recovering your data. For a little more reassurance and financial investment, data recovery software is available for purchase. One of the more popular programs is Recover Lost Data, also for Windows systems. This program allows you to even recover deleted emails in addition to deleted files, for about US$40.

And Mac users, we gotcha covered... check out Data Rescue for one of the most highly touted of the Mac file recovery utilities.

Prevention Is The Best Method

There is an old saying in the technical world -- your data is only as good as your last backup. It is impossible to stress enough the importance of backing up crucial files. You don't even have to deal with the hassle of external backup drives and tapes if you don't want to, particularly if you are not backing up more than a gigabyte of data. After all, we live in a world of USB flash drives and high-speed bandwidth. There are sites available for as low of a cost as $5.00 per month where you can upload your most precious bits of data for safe storage. In the event of a complete computer crash, you will still be able to download your important files from a data storage provider on the Internet. One such company is Box.net which offers 1 gigabyte of storage space.

Microsoft is even getting around to addressing the issue of data backups and disaster recovery for the average home user. Vista, Microsoft's newest OS, has a basic file back up and restore feature. You can schedule when the backup occurs, and disk space is conserved; only changes to a file are backed up (called incremental backup). Vista also comes with a Recovery Wizard to aid you in file restoration. You can even restore files from an old PC to a new one, by following the prompts of the Recovery Wizard.

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