When you create a file, it has its first bite at existence, an existence which continues until you, in your casual god-like manner, delete it. Deleting the file isn’t the end, though. All you need to do is open up the Recycle Bin on your desktop, select the file and drag it onto the desktop or into an Explorer window to recover it. Or simply double-click to open the Recycle Bin, select the file, and choose Restore from the pop-up menu to restore it to its original folder. Voila! Witness the file’s second coming.

Now, what happens if you empty the Recycle Bin? Surely that’s the end of the file’s existence? To all appearances, yes. The file will appear to have been completely annihilated. But that’s only because Microsoft reckons once you’ve deleted a file and emptied the Recycle Bin, you and the file have both had enough chances. But with an undelete utility there’s a good chance you can resurrect the file yet again for its third go at life – good news for those of us whose fingers work faster than our brains.

When a file is deleted from your computer, its contents aren’t immediately destroyed. Windows simply marks the hard drive space as being available for use by changing one character in the file table so that the file entry won’t be displayed in My Computer or a commandline DIR command, etc. If you manage to start an undeletion process before Windows uses that part of the hard drive to write a new file, all you have to do is set that flag back to “on” and you get the file.

Obviously, the sooner you try to restore a deleted file, the more successful you’ll be. But stop a moment and think about the other things that could cause this part of the hard drive to be overwritten. If your hard drive is pretty full, the odds are much greater that Windows will grab your precious unallocated space for its next write. Or, if you defrag the hard drive, you run the risk of unused parts of the drive being overwritten! (This also means that if you are running silent background defrag services like Diskeeper, or if you have defrag utilities scheduled to defrag automatically, you might get blindsided - lose your chance at data recovery - if you don’t halt them until you have your deleted file recovered.