One of our clients was recently cleaning up the files on his business laptop and he accidentally deleted a large folder containing years of his work. He had emptied and recycle bin. The files were gone. He panicked.
Instead of waiting for us, he purchased, downloaded, and installed a $49 utility for restoring deleted files. The ran the application and chose to restore the files to the same hard drive they were deleted from.
It didn’t work. The software identified a laundry list of files that were recently deleted, but when he restored them only 25% of these files would open. Why? The answer lies in what happens when a file is deleted.
When you delete a file on your computer the actual data on your hard drive is not immediately deleted. Even though you don’t see the file anymore, it is still there. However, this data is marked by the operating as usable blank space. Next time you save a file, the computer will use this space. When this happens, your files will be irrecoverably destroyed.
When this client installed the recovery utility on this drive he destroyed some of the very data he was hoping to recovery. Following this when he chose to save the found files onto the drive he was recovering from, he destroyed almost all of them during the process. The result was that only a very small portion of the files he wanted back were available. After he did this, there was nothing more we could do. It was a sad event in that it was so available. If he hadn’t attempted the recovery himself we would have been able to recover almost every file.
If you accidentally delete your files — do not panic! Turn the computer off. Call us. If you want your files back, let a trained professional do it for you.