April 19, 2024

Lost Sectors On A Hard Drive Aren’t Necessarily Gone Forever

2 min read

Are you worried about deleted files? You may have accidentally pressed delete or empty recycle bin and you suddenly think to yourself that you might need those actual files. What you need to remember that once you delete a file, it doesn’t mean that it’s gone forever. It is still on your hard drive and even though you have emptied it from the recycle bin, you or even other people can still recover these files. The lost sectors in your computer aren’t truly lost and this is also why you also need to be careful about having other people find out about your delete files.

Things That Go Down When You Delete Files
If you are looking for ways on how to recover lost sectors you are in luck since they are not permanently gone. Most operating systems keep track of the files and where they are on the hard drive. They will track down a certain pointer. Each of the files and the folders on your hard disk has a pointer which in turn tells the operating system where the file’s data begins and also where it ends.

Deleting a file means that the operating system removes the pointer then it marks the sector which contains the file’s data. In the point of view of the system, the file is no longer there and it frees up your space.

The truth is the system actually writes a new data over the sectors that have the contains the file. This means that the file can still be recovered. When you go for file recovery programs, you can find that they can scan the hard drives for deleted files and then restore them. When the file is overwritten then the file recovery program is able to recover only part of that data. What you have to remember as well is that this will not typically apply to solid-state drives or SSDs.

Your operating system makes it a point to delete your files faster which is why you can still recover it eventually. This is because actually deleting the file and overwriting its pointer takes time since the system would have to overwrite its data. In case you really would lie to delete a file and all its contents, you can find a file shredding tool which can help you get rid of the file permanently. This is why you don’t have to worry about recovering lost data especially when you haven’t even gone to overwrite that same data using any their party applications.

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