A user can choose to have multiple partitions on one physical drive. One of the partitions can be used as a safe place to recover files, since restoring data on the same logical drive may not be possible. Or, if you prefer not to keep all your eggs in one basket, keeping an additional partitioned and formatted drive in your computer will ensure you have room for recovered files, or even enough room for more data should your primary drive fail physically and require copying. Funny as that sounds, data recovery specialists recommend copying your old data to your functioning drive as soon as function is restored, since the drive can no longer be depended on.
Another suggestion is to stop working after you've had an accidental deletion. The reason? While you work and save your files you write data to your drive. The file you want to recover may be among those with unallocated space and may be in danger of being overwritten. If that does happen, unless you know your data byte for byte, the file is pretty well gone. After a deletion, stop work and start recovery.
While it may seem self evident to some, consider looking in your recycle bin if you're using windows. As an interesting aside, recycle bin is a good example of how a file can be deleted and actually be gone nowhere. Moving the mouse cursor over a "deleted" file in the recycle bin will often reveal its size, original location, the type of file it was and if it was an image a thumbnail will already be displayed. This is a clear demonstration of the presence of your data on your computer even after you've made an effort to get rid of it.
Avoid running a disk defragmenter until you've gotten back your files. The disk defragmentation program works to place software and files on your hard drive into contiguous memory locations for easier access. Over time and as more programs are installed and uninstalled, files tend to be broken into pieces and put into different geographic locations on the hard drive. New installations and write operations don't always use contiguous segments in the save operations, which in turn increases access time. Defragmentation grabs the unjoined pieces of your programs and data and places them so they are located in one place and not scattered over different locations. All this moving around files will in some cases speed up the file access time of your computer. But by the time of completion, if you didn't undelete your files, your deleted files are all gone.
If your hard drive is almost full, you have a higher risk of losing accidentally deleted files than you would if your drive was nearly empty. The above suggestion to not work on your computer till you have recovered your files applies here with severity. A drive that is nearly full has fewer and fewer places to write data when you save. And although still intact on the drive, a "deleted" file is technically "open territory" and unprotected-your operating system, looking for places to place your files and programs, will likely overwrite this location with new data. The risk of this happening is much higher if your drive has nearly run out of space. This does not apply however to files in the recycle bin, which technically have not been deleted.
Undelete software available on the web for download will ease the recovery process, but only if you have a file that can be retrieved. It is well known that conventional undelete software or freeware is available from several software companies on the web and can be downloaded and installed within minutes, but if, for example the disk is nearly full and the user saved more work, the file may have been overwritten. Hopefully these suggestions will provide ideas to make file recovery safer, less stressful, and less involved.
