How to recover deleted files

A common problem is for files to be deleted, either by accident, or by mistake. The first recovery method maybe to see if the file still exists in the recycle bin. If the recycle bin is not successful, then CnW Recovery software will probably succeed.

Stage 1

Deleted files are normally files that have had their index marked as deleted and hence the data is still on the drive. All of CnW Recovery recovery screens have an option to recover deleted files, and this will work with varying degrees of success.

Deleted recovery is very successful with NTFS and the routine will even indicate which files have been overwritten, or partially overwritten. All such files are recovered to a directoiry called !DELETED - which then contains a valid subdirectory path

Deleted FAT files are slightly less predictable. For instance, for files with a short name, the first character of the file name cannot be reconstructed, and so with CnW, this is displayed as an ‘!’. The other problem with FAT files is that a deleted file may mean a complete directory tree is missing, and so many files will not be recovered. Fortunately, there is a solution by using the Recover from Directory Stubs. The final problem with some FAT 32 restores is that the location of the first cluster is sometimes cleared when the the file is deleted. This deletion is partial but often the clusters greater than 16 bits long are truncated. CnW software does handle this correctly - an area that many software recovery programs fail on.

FAT disks that contain files that have been fragmented often result in corrupted files. CnW are working on solutions for this problem.

Stage 2

If the stage 1 above does not recover the correct files, then the best way forward is to do a raw recovery on the whole disk. For camera memory chips, and phone chips where most of the files required are just photos, this is a very reliable solution.