deleted file question

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

Is there a way to retrieve a file that has been permanently deleted from the recycle bin?

TIA.

[Goober McTuber]

Is there a way to retrieve a file that has been permanently deleted from the recycle bin?

TIA.

I believe you need special tools. There are people that specialize in that kind of stuff, for a fee. I hope it wasn’t something critical. If it was naked pictures of your mom, I’ve still got a couple I could hook you up with.

[Dinsdale]

http://www.recuva.com/

[PSUFAN]

Recovery tools can be of use in some situations. The data on your drives, when it is deleted, doesn't go away until that sector is actually overwritten. In other words, if I have a 100 gig drive full of mp3s and I delete them all, and the OS shows me that the space is free now, it's actually still there until something else gets written over it.

[ElTaco]

Were you able to recover? There are a ton of 'recovery' tools out there. As PSU has stated, there Nothing is actually deleted until it is over written. In general, the government claims (DOD and NSA) that anything over written 7 times is securely deleted. In general anything over written with a low level format one time is for the most part guaranteed to be unrecoverable unless someone uses some very very very expensive tools. A standard overwrite will stop your standard software tools from working.

What does all this mean? Well just search for undelete/recover tools, download one and have it search your drive for the file.
http://undelete-plus.com/ is free for non-commercial use currently.

Or try this open source one:
http://ntfsundelete.com/

They all work very similar. They scan your file system bit by bit looking for certain file characters that indicate a new file and then compare the files they find with what is in the File System's list of files. if it is missing, it will include it in the list of recoverable files. Then once it finishes the scan, it provides you with the list of files and directories. You just search through until you find your file. Be careful because there could be multiple iterations depending on what this file is and how long you've had it. Then just select the ones you want and tell the software to recover it.

[Dinsdale]

And if you haven't recovered said file yet, I hope you don't have regularly scheduled defrag since the file was lost... since it will most likely be gone at that point.