Is it possible to recover files deleted from the recycling bin?

[Carl45456]

I have a design that I made for my brother and after a couple of weeks he now wants to make changes to it, but it turns out I cleaned my recylcing bin.

 

Is it possible to recover the files?

[Naijin]

1 minute ago, Carl45456 said:

I have a design that I made for my brother and after a couple of weeks he now wants to make changes to it, but it turns out I cleaned my recylcing bin.

 

Is it possible to recover the files?

If you have a hard drive, you can try recovery tools and hope it's not overwritten.

If on flash storage, it's probably a lot harder if it's a couple of weeks ago.

[Carl45456]

Just now, Naijin said:

If you have a hard drive, you can try recovery tools and hope it's not overwritten.

If on flash storage, it's probably a lot harder if it's a couple of weeks ago.

Cool, I am on hard drive. What the best software to do this?

[Naijin]

2 minutes ago, Carl45456 said:

Cool, I am on hard drive. What the best software to do this?

You could try Recuva for example, it's free. Plenty of other tools out there.

[Eigenvektor]

5 minutes ago, Carl45456 said:

Cool, I am on hard drive. What the best software to do this?

There are multiple such tools, such as https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva.

 

Deleting a file does not actually delete it, but just marks it as deleted. However, that means any writes after this point in time may overwrite the file's contents. The more time has passed since then, the more likely the file has been (partially) overwritten. Also keep in mind that installing recovery software is a write operation, which means it might be the thing that finally makes the file unrecoverable.

[mariushm]

When you delete a file, the data on the hard drive is not erased, just the entry that says "file xyz is located here on the hard drive" is erased. If you run at recovery software that scans the surface of the drive, it may be able to determine that there's some usable data at that position, and that no entry is present in the list of files for that location, and recover the file based on the content there.

Lots of file formats have specific signatures at the start of the file (ex PDF for pdf files, PK for zip files etc) so the recovery software could detect that start signature and recover the file.

Even so, often the file can be recovered only if it wasn't fragmented... which happens on big file sizes.  A file could be created and stored in multiple areas of the hard drive, for example a 1000 MB movie file may have the first 100 MB  at one position on the drive, then the other 900 MB somewhere else on the drive - the recovery software may only be able to recover those first 100 MB because the information about where the other 900 MB was stored is lost.

 

Also, the more stuff you write on the drive between the moment you deleted the file and try to recover it, the less chances to recover the file. Once the file entry was deleted, the the area where the file was located is now available to be reserved by other files or by temporary files, so the operating system could reserve a portion of the space previously used by your deleted file to other files and overwrite the old content, making it impossible to recover.

For example, you opening a website in Chrome/Firefox makes the browser download a picture and the browser will want to cache those pictures, so the browser will tell the operating system it wants to create a 300 KB file and write the picture to the drive. The operating system may pick the 50th megabyte from that 100 MB of video I gave in the example above, so the picture would be stored there.  Now when you run the recovery software, the software would recognize that a movie starts, and recover 50 MB, up until the point where that 300 KB image file was saved.