Deleted files recovery Is it possible to recover data from the overwritten hard drive?

Many people have asked the similar question that can the deleted files on an overwritten hard drive still can be recovered? To answer this question, you have to know what happens when the data lost.

What happens when you delete files?

The data on the hard drive are physically stored here and are all managed by the file system. The file system create and contains all the information about the data, such as information table which contains the location of all data so that the data can be stored on different location and can be accessed quickly. Therefore, when you delete a certain file from the hard drive, the data information table in the file system will be removed. Without the location information, the file system cannot locate the data so that you cannot find them in your computer. But the real content of the data will not be removed, and they stays here until the system want to store new data. The system will access to the file system table for the free space. As the location of the deleted data has been marked as free, the system will write new data to replace the raw data. Until now, the deleted data has been erased from the drive and become unrecoverable. Similarly, when you format the hard drive, the data also will not be erased from here. If you only perform a high-level formatting, or quick format, it only empty the file system, the content of data will not be deleted.

Is it possible to recover data after overwritten occurs?

When you write new data to the hard drive, it requires for free space. The raw data will be physically removed from where it previously stored so that to be overwritten by new data. Until now, there is no data recovery software or technology known can help you to recover the overwritten data. Of course, if you only overwritten part of your data, you still can try the data recovery software to retrieve these data. Sometimes, even if you have write new data to the hard drive after data loss, it does not necessary means that your data have been overwritten. You can just take the data recovery software to try to restore your lost files.

At last, I would reiterate that backup is the most important way to secure your data. No one can predict when you will have a data loss or not. Once you have data loss, you will not be lucky at every time to recover your data.