Glitzo: 5/18/08

Oh crap! You deleted a file a few days ago that you just realized you still need! And on top of that you already emptied out your Recycle Bin, so there’s nothing there! Well basically, Windows has nothing built-in that will help you recover your deleted file. However, thanks to the way Windows works, when you delete a file or even empty it from your recycle bin, Windows does not actually DELETE the file off the hard drive, it simply deletes the reference to the file.

For example, when you go to a library to find a book, you usually go to the index catalog and find the aisle number for your book. If you delete the index that tells you which aisle that book is located at, the book is still there, but no one may ever find it again! That’s the same way deleting works in Windows, the index to that file is deleted, but not the file itself. But of course, this now means that Windows can use that space to write other files when the time arises! It counts that space as free space, so you have to hope that Windows has not already written over that section!

The program that can help you recover your deleted files is Recuva (to be pronounced as Recover). It’s from the same people who wrote CCleaner, which is a great program to delete temporary files and clean out your registry. I scanned my C drive and it found 5495 files in about 30 seconds!!! Pretty damn fast!!! You can also filter the contents by typing in the name of the file or extension in the Find box.