Principles of File Recovery

The Principles of File Recovery
Data recovery may be used frequently in our daily life. It will always result in the loss of some documents when accidently delete some folder or the operate system crashed. Then we will try many methods to recover the lost documents, such as finding a lot of data recovery software or finding some data recovery company to help to do so. In fact, if we know more about the principles of data storage, and data recovery principles. We can completely restore the lost documents all by yourselves.

Firstly, let's look at what happens when we intentionally delete a file and why it may be possible to bring that file back. When you select a file and press the delete key on a Windows computer, the file is sent to the Recycle Bin. You may think of the Windows Recycle Bin as just another fancy storage folder on your hard drive. The real deletion is what happens when the Recycle Bin is emptied or the deletion bypasses the Windows Recycle Bin altogether.

File Recovery Programs
There is no shortage of file recovery software to help you out if you delete the wrong file. There are numerous commercial file recovery programs, DOS has its own 'Undelete' command, and Windows has the familiar Recycle Bin. Except for Recycle Bin, they all work on the same principle of searching the hard drive for files that have recently been marked for overwriting. More advanced ones will also tell you how much of the file is recoverable by checking how much has been written over.

The seemingly simple Recycle Bin has one advantage over any third party file recovery program: it doesn't allow any overwriting of deleted files stored in there. This means that files from here are recovered in their entirety, and will function exactly as before once they are restored.

Obstacles to File Recovery
The biggest obstacle by far is time. The longer you wait, the higher the chance of a deleted file being written over, unless it is safely in the Recycle Bin. Once this has happened file recovery is still possible but it will take a lot more than a bit of commercial software to do it.

Operating systems are continuously creating files, every web page you visit does the same, and so does every application you open. With this in mind, the time to start your file recovery process is the instant that you realize you needed that file.

There are lots of data recovery software can be found in the markets, even some free data recovery tools have the some functions. But their works are certainly the same. So if you little knowledge of the working principle of data recovery and data storage of knowledge, you can recover the lost document all by yourselves.