Similar to human, files do have ghost , when you delete a file considering it to be a god like behavior. Now, what happens if you empty the Recycle Bin? Surely that’s the end of the file’s life? We feel that file is gone but with an undelete utility there’s a good chance you can bring back the file to life like a ghost – so once file is back the only thing which comes to mind is Murphy’s law “The probability of a hard-disk crash increases with the number of days since the drive was last backed up”. So we start thinking of putting up a serious backup mechanism in place and think that we would follow our backup procedures religiously but again Murphy has a saying for this “You can’t prevent disasters, but you can diminish their frequency and severity”.

Ok, so now the real stuff is you’ve deleted a file or files, and sent them to the Recycle Bin. Then, being careful, you emptied the Recycle Bin to free up the disk space.

Oops! Your wedding pictures were in that folder! Or the pictures of your Hawaii trip.

And those pictures are gone!

Google “undelete” and try third party undelete applications.

Of course the most important precaution, the less work you do with your computer, in the meantime, the better your chances of recovering your deleted files/folders intact. Saving more files on the same partition would cause permanent data loss as new files might overwrite orphaned deleted data.