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One Day, You Will Need File Recovery.

File recovery is something you will eventually need; it is only a matter of time before you accidentally delete an important file. There are plenty of software companies around, all vying to sell products that promise quick and easy file recovery. Unfortunately, they don't always deliver.

File Recovery from Recycle Bin.

Windows Recycle Bin is well known, and apparently offers simple and foolproof file recovery. The reality is that a surprising number of deleted files cannot be recovered from the Recycle Bin.

Windows programs perform a special operation to move files to the Recycle Bin rather than just deleting them, and not all of them offer this feature. Users who work in the Windows command shell, for instance, soon discover that the shell's DEL command does exactly that, they are deleted without ever going to the Recycle Bin.

Recycle Bin has a finite size and eventually it will fill up and start throwing files away. You can adjust the size of your Recycle Bin of course, but there are practical limits to this. Nobody wants to turn there PC into one big Recycle Bin.

How File Recovery Utilities Work.

Windows files are stored in one or more blocks of a fixed size, big files use several blocks while a small file may use just one. Windows keeps track of where all the blocks that make up any particular file are located, and where all the unused blocks are.

When you tell Windows to delete a file it does not physically erase all the blocks that that file was using, it only marks them as unused. File recovery utilities work by locating all the blocks that belonged to recently deleted files and uses them to reconstruct your lost file.

The Problem with File Recovery Utilities.

Getting your file recovery software into action in time is the biggest problem. Imagine that you accidentally delete a file, but don't realize that you didn't really want to do that until 30 minutes later. For those 30 minutes your files blocks have been marked as unused, and if you did anything that wrote information to the hard drive Windows could have written over your information. If that has happened your problem has got a thousand times worse, and unless that file was worth spending a few months and a mountain of money to retrieve you can forget about recovering it.

Another common problem is that people don't think about file recovery software until they moment they actually delete that important file. Finding one is easy - some are even free - but are you going to search the internet for it? That creates many new files, that could be written over the file you are trying to save. Even if you go to another machine to locate, purchase, and download a file recovery utility, you will still have to bring it back to your first computer and install it. Guess what? Installing it too can overwrite the data you are hoping to recover.

There is an obvious lesson to be learned here, obtain and install some file recovery software before you need it!