Deleted Files

How can I get back a file that has been deleted?

With difficulty. If you haven't made many changes to the disk you might be able to use Norton Undelete or something.

It may just have ended up in the Recycle Bin, though :)

The recycle bin is empty. I heard people mention retrieving deleted files before and I just wondered how it was done.

Usually by grovelling through the FAT to find entries that have been marked as deleted and trying to reconstruct a file from them.

Not an easy thing to do then.

Not particularly. But there *are* tools to do it.

Look on Google, some of them may be free.


This does, of course, only work if you haven't saved a file on top of it so be careful what you do, and DO NOT defragment the disk.

It's alright this time cause I had the file on a backup disk, so I only lost yesterdays updates.

Would it be hard to write my own programme to get deleted files back?

You'd need to do it in C, or something similar. Also, I think you need permissions (at least in NT) to access the disk directly.

Whether the same stands for NTFS I don't know, I know you can do it with FAT though.

So yes, it's possible. Just not simple.