Deleting a file removes the entry about where it is located and marks the space as “reusable”, leaving everything in the exact location. That is why recovery works, and why every time you leave a computer turned on, it is quietly rewriting over those spaces (the ones containing deleted files) while you decide what to do.
Not when you realised it had happened. Every update, every cache write, every search index pass, every save is potentially going to be written to the same space as the file used to occupy, and this will happen with a working computer doing these things without being asked.
A mechanical hard drive deletes a file by removing its directory entry and marking the space available for reuse. However, the actual data remains in place until something else has been written over it, which, depending upon the amount of free space, can take months. This gap is the whole basis for recovering deleted files.
The way that deletion works on SSDs (solid-state drives) differs from HDDs (hard disk drives), with usually a poorer outcome. TRIM tells the controller of the SSD which sectors/blocks are empty, and then the controller clears out these sectors, often in just a few minutes. Once a block on a NAND chip has been cleared, no software or lab will ever be able to retrieve information from that block.
The first two questions are: what media did the file reside on, and has there been activity on the media since?
Stop writing to the drive. We want to emphasise “writing” as opposed to “deleting”. Simply stopping delete actions does little good when you are still browsing, saving files, running installs and updating in the background. All of this uses up available space, and available space is where your lost/deleted file resides.
Check the obvious places. Recycle Bin, Previous Versions in the folder, OneDrive/Google Drive Version History, Time Machine. There have been many instances where an enquiry ended without us needing to recover their missing data because they found their file in one of these locations.
If you try software, install it elsewhere. Installing a recovery tool on the same drive would overwrite exactly the area where your file existed. Write your recovery program to a removable flash drive or install it on a completely separate computer.
If the drive is also noisy, do not run software at all. A scanning operation will cause a failing drive to seek data for hours. The deleted files on an otherwise functioning drive may be recovered later; however, a failing drive cannot wait.
Not fatal on a mechanical drive. The pointer is gone and your data remains. We would expect that if you stop using the drive then your chances of recovering the data are good.
Entirely dependent upon how much has been written after the deletion. The file is often left intact on a lightly used drive which still has plenty of free space available.
Generally no, and we will tell you this before we take payment. A TRIM operation erases the blocks. If the machine had been turned off immediately after the deletion then the recovery could be successful.
From £250 +VAT for memory cards and USB sticks. From £300 +VAT for drives. Logical recovery is also the cheapest form of data recovery that we perform.