HOW TO AVOID UNWANTED FILE RECOVERY

Read how files are deleted and why they can be recovered. How to recover deleted files or delete them permanently. During a simple deletion of files from hard drive, they are not completely deleted; information about these files remains on the hard drive even after emptying the Recycle Bin. It is this function that allows you or others to recover these files. In case of carelessness, confidential files deleted by you can be restored by other people and used for their own purposes.

What Happens During File Deletion

Windows keeps track of the location of files on your hard drive using "tags." Each file and folder on your hard drive has a label that the operating system uses to determine the beginning and end of the file.

When you delete a file, Windows removes the mark and marks the sectors in which the file data is located as free. From the point of view of the file system, these files are no longer on the hard disk and the sectors with such data are considered free.

Therefore, until the moment that Windows overwrites this data with new information, the deleted files are recoverable. File recovery software can scan your hard drive, detect such data, and recover files. If the data in the deleted file was partially overwritten, only part of the data will be recovered, and the recovered file may be “broken” or damaged.

Why Deleted Files Are Not Instantly Deleted

Why doesn't the computer erase deleted files when they are deleted? Removing a file label and freeing up that disk space is a very quick operation. On the contrary, erasing the file information from the disk surface by rewriting it takes much longer. For example, deleting 10GB of files is almost instantaneous. But the complete erasure of this information will take a few minutes, almost as long as the process of writing 10 GB of data to the hard drive.

To improve performance and reduce uptime, Windows and other operating systems do not overwrite data when files are deleted. If you need to erase the contents of a file while deleting it, you can use a special erase tool.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) work differently. Everything described above applies to hard drives (HDD). When using an SSD with the TRIM function active (and it is present in all modern computers), the deleted files are instantly erased and cannot be recovered. What is noteworthy is that this does not apply to external SSD drives, they work on the principle of HDD drives.

Files are instantly overwritten by the operating system to increase data writing speed in the future, and if information about files is not instantly overwritten, you will need to do so the next time new files are saved to disk. This will make the SSD slower over time.

Recover deleted files

If you accidentally deleted files and they need to be restored, remember the following:

The file should be restored as soon as possible: As Windows continues to write files to the hard drive, and the chances that the information it needs will be overwritten increases by the minute. For the best chance of a successful completion of the process, your recovery should begin as soon as possible.

Hard drive usage should be kept to a minimum: The best way to recover a deleted file from a hard drive is to shut down the computer and connect the hard drive to another computer, then restore the file using the other computer's operating system. If you work with the hard drive from which the file was deleted, you run the risk of overwriting it.

The Windows operating system has no built-in tools with which you can scan your hard drive to find deleted files. But for this there are a lot of third-party programs that do an excellent job of the task.

The utility to recover data after formatting the hard drive will scan your storage media and recover the deleted files.

How to avoid unwanted file recovery

If you store confidential or personal data on your computer, it may be important to you that it is impossible to retrieve and that it does not fall into other hands. If you are selling or giving away a computer or hard drive to someone, you need to fix it.

To do this, you can use one of the many hard disk cleaning programs, which will simply overwrite all the information on the disk and all deleted files will be destroyed.

But the use of such programs does not always produce the desired result. You can erase only part of the disk or one of the local ones, and the copies of the deleted files will be saved on the other. Therefore, it is better to clean existing physical disks.

Please note that this process takes much more time than simply deleting files.