It happens to everyone. You are cleaning up some old files on your computer, and you drag a folder to the trash, and automatically empty your recycle bin. To your horror you realize that you just deleted your entire My Pictures folder. Not to worry, there are many ways to recover those "deleted" files.

If you are running Windows XP, the information that organizes the files on your hard drive is kept in the Master File Table or MFT for short. This file tracks the location of every block of every file on the hard drive, and it's kept in a separate location on the drive. This table is important because when a file is deleted, the MFT changes the status of the file to show that it has been deleted and that its space is now available for use. The contents of the file are still in that space. This means that a undelete utility can change this status and return the file to normal usage. Un-deleting a file isn't much of a problem until the contents of the file, that "empty" space, is overwritten. This makes it very important that once you know that you have deleted your files you must "un-delete" them right away. Some utilities will actually show you ahead of time how much of your deleted files have been overwritten, and the probability of a successful recovery.

Some situations can occur where the Master File Table has been corrupted, and your recovery utility must attempt to recover the file by attempting to recognize the data in the sectors of the hard drive. The utility will actually search for the file header of a specific file type; for example, Microsoft Word files always have a certain beginning and end of file. Your software will attempt to recover the data based on these headers and footers.

To sum it up, it's important to recover your deleted files as soon as you notice they are gone. It's a neither lengthy nor difficult process to get your data back, and you usually won't have to resort to an expensive data recovery service.