Many of your friends, colleagues or acquaintances might have told you that it is impossible to recover deleted files from a hard disk. Well, let me clarify this straight away: this is a LIE!
Data loss might originate from power cuts, a computer virus, accidental deleting of files, accidental formatting of hard disk and more. All of mentioned ways of data loss can be reversed by using a special software called data recovery software. However, the software is limited. It cannot recover files from physically damaged data storage mediums. This means that if your data loss occurred through hard disk crash, disasters like floods, fire, etc, you have little chance of recovering the data.
What really happens when you accidentally delete or format a hard disk? To know this, you need to understand how the computer reads a file from the hard disk. The operating system reads a file as follows:
- Read read data from directory entry (the directory entry stores information about where files are located on the drive).
- Read data in data area of hard disk
- Read the data until the file is completely read.
Now, when you delete a file or format a drive, the directory entry of the file or drive is deleted. If there is no directory, there is no way for the operating system to access the file in data area, since it does not know the exact location of the file on the hard disk.
A simplified example of this process would be: You are looking for the phone number of friend in the telephone directory. If you do not have the telephone directory in first place, how can you find the number and how can you phone him?
However, if your directory entry is deleted, this does not mean your data is deleted also. It IS there, but with no path to access it. This is where data recovery software comes into play.
Data recovery software allows you to create a path to the file and enable you to read it. It reads the whole hard disk to find the data.
You might be asking yourself why read the entire hard disk? Well, you might not know this, but files are usually stored in fragments on a hard disk. Therefore, the software needs to read all the hard disk to find all the fragments, join them up and proclaim it has successfully recovered your file. However, if you have used your hard disk to store other files after you have accidentally deleted your files or formatted your hard disk, them your chances of recovering the file might get slim.
You see, the hard disk might have over written the file with new data. Once overwritten, it gets very difficult to recover them. Even if one fragment is deleted, the file cannot be revered. This is why data recovery experts say that once you have noticed you have experienced loss of data on a drive, stop using that drive immediately to avoid the overwriting of lost data and to maximize data recovery chances. The data recovery experts also tell you to defragment you drives regularly. This increases the chances of data recovery since your files would most likely be in one complete piece.
Here are some other tips to maximize your data recovery chances:
- Avoid storing data in the root of your hard disk, that is store your files in folders, not at the top level of a hard disk.. This make recovery easy since files in folders are easier to recover.
- Do not store data on small capacity drive. This increases the defragmentation level.
- Defragment your external storage medium (flash disk, floppy disk, etc) after you have placed data on them.
Finally, do not panic the next time you have accidentally caused some sort of data loss, just follow the above tips and you will be all right.
Hirvesh Marshall maintains a web page on FREE File Undelete Utilities, Data Recovery, Software to Recover Deleted Files, Folders and Partitions, Recover Formatted Disks (codefusionlab.co.cc/) and another page on FREE Disk Tools (codefusionlab.co.cc/freedisktools.html) at Codefusion Lab. Codefusion Lab is a site dedicated to provide free and useful software to other persons. You can get more software at Codefusion Lab: Free PC Tools and Webmaster's Resource
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