Cause of loss · files that are no longer there
Stop using the machine, then tell us what sort of drive the file was on, because that second answer settles most of it. Delete on a hard disk and the name comes off the index while those clusters return to the free list; the bytes inside them sit tight until another file wants the room, which can take weeks. An SSD will not hang about like that. TRIM has the controller wipe the cells and it obliges without being asked twice, usually before anyone has decided what to do. Both cases are covered further down, and both reach this bench from Nottingham. Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT, a drive is £300 + VAT, the assessment is free, and most jobs carry no fee unless the files come back.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Gone, and not in the Recycle Bin either | Never reached the bin — Shift+Delete, or a card, or a stick, or something over the size limit | Nothing more gets written to it |
| Larger than the bin will take | Windows removed it there and then; the bin never had it | What was in it is usually intact |
| Missing from a camera card or off a USB stick | There is no bin on a card or a stick, so out the entry goes immediately | Take it out, then leave it alone |
| Everything went after a sync | OneDrive or similar has brought across a deletion made on another machine | Look in that service's own online bin |
| A folder you use every day, now empty | Somebody deleted it, a sync misfired, or you are in a second profile | Turn it off before you go looking |
| An SSD, and the file is gone from the listing | TRIM has reached the controller, which empties the freed blocks within seconds | Unplug it this minute |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Leave a computer switched on and it will write to its own disk all day without consulting anybody: thumbnail caches, browser files, an update unpacking in the background. Every one of those writes goes wherever there is room, and the room your file occupied is now counted as free space. So the disk comes out, and it is imaged.
Where the index survives, names and dates and the folder tree return with the contents. Otherwise files come out of the image one at a time, each on the signature its own format opens with.
A number on a report proves nothing. What happens instead is that recovered files are opened and looked at here, with anything you marked as important checked on its own.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
One keystroke, two entirely different clocks. Bytes written onto platters stay put, sometimes for years, and vanish only when a later file claims that room. Do the same thing over an SSD and TRIM can have those cells emptied in minutes. Same action, opposite result — which is why the opening question here is about the drive and not about the file, and why a free assessment settles it on day one.
A trade counter in Lincoln put a year of bookkeeping through a single keystroke, bin and all, on the office machine. The drive was imaged the day it landed and the index rebuilt from that copy instead of the disk, and the folder came back whole with filenames and dates attached.
That depends on the medium far more than on the file. Where there are platters, the contents stay put in their sectors until another file needs that room, and jobs of the kind mostly end well. An SSD running TRIM clears the blocks off its own bat, frequently before anybody has shut the machine down.
Not on a hard disk. Skipping the bin is all Shift+Delete does; either route frees the clusters, and the bytes inside them do not move an inch. Convenience was all the Recycle Bin ever offered — protection was never part of it.
No. Confirm the prompt on a stick, or on a camera card, and Windows carries it out immediately with nothing kept in reserve. What was written normally stays down in the flash, and flash is what our tools read: the chips, rather than the directory above them.
Because the drive keeps house on its own. Under TRIM the file system announces which blocks it no longer needs, and rather than wait for a fresh write the controller empties them in advance. None of that surfaces anywhere you can see. Minutes is what an SSD leaves you; a hard disk can leave you weeks.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.