What To Do When You Need To Recover Lost Files

 If you've ever been in a position of having lost files somehow, you'll recognize that terrible feeling of panic as you realize your file has just slipped into oblivion. Where is it now? Well, the good news is that it's not actually gone - it's just hiding behind a digital wall. Your files are playing hide and seek with you - so to recover lost files, all you need to do is go and find them.
Easier said than done? Not if you know what you're doing. When your computer initially saved your file, it did so in a specific way. If you're the owner of a "normal" hard drive, your computer system will have written your Word, Excel, Photoshop, JPG - or whichever file type - to a series of specific locations on the drive. The file is fragmented: bits of it are put here and other bits there.
"Why does my computer fragment these files" we hear you ask. Surely it would be more logical to just put the files nose-to-tail so that when you accidentally delete the pointer file to a specific bit of data, you know just where it is - so you can recover lost files more easily. Yes - it would be - and in fact to begin with, this is just what a hard drive does. It writes files one after the other. If you never deleted anything, that's just how it would continue. However, as files are deleted, they leave gaps - some of them very small. So, when new files are written, they're written over multiple locations to fill those gaps.
Your hard drive is being "digi-sensible." It does make it more complex to recover deleted files, of course: which is where data recovery software comes in.
The best data recovery software on the market knows your system filing structure already - and can presume with some accuracy where your "deleted" items are so it can recover lost files fairly quickly. Just don't go writing more stuff onto the drive, or you might end up overwriting the lost files you want to recover.