Recovering lost data can be as simple as opening the Window’s Recycle bin, or it might require spending a lot of money on specialized data recovery software or services. In the worst case scenario, you might even have to deliver your hard drive to data recovery center. Below are the factors that change the degree of difficulty you can have in recovering your data:

• In what way the data is deleted.
• What is the file system of the hard drive?
• Whether the drive uses magnetic, optical, magneto-optical, or flash memory to store data.
• Which operating system is used?
• Is there any data protection software installed?
• Whether the drive has suffered from physical damage to heads, platters, or its circuit board.

The Windows Recycle Bin

When you delete a file in the Windows, it is deleted from its normal location and it is sent to Recycle bin. Windows reserves about 1% of hard drive space for Recycle bin and whatever is sent to the Recycle bin is actually protected from being overwritten by the system. However, when deleted file exceeds the capacity of Recycle bin, windows will overwrite the older files in Recycle bin. As a result, you are more likely to retrieve the file if you discover it has been sent to Recycle bin accidentally. To retrieve a file from Recycle bin, open the Recycle bin, select the file, right click it and select Restore. Windows will list the file in its original location and removes it from the Recycle bin. If a file is deleted when you hold down the Shift key, the Recycle bin is bypassed. In this case, the data recovery software is need to retrieve the lost data.

Recover Files that Are Not in the Recycle Bin

The Recycle is a good first line of defense when it comes to data recovery. However it can be bypassed and it does not keep the deleted files forever. You have to use data recovery software, such as REMO Recover, if you want to retrieve files that are not in the Recycle bin. REMO Recover (Windows) is an integrated utility suit for windows and Mac that offers many features which include deleted partition recovery and laptop hard drive recovery. It is also en email recovery software which would recover the lost e-mails.

Recovering Data from Partitioned and Formatted Drives

When a hard disk, floppy disk, or removable-media drive has been formatted, its file allocation table, which is used to determine the location of the files, is lost. If a hard drive has been repartitioned with FDISK or another partitioning program, the original file system and partition information is lost. In such cases, more powerful data recovery tools much be used to retrieve data. To retrieve data from an accidentally formatted drive, you have two options:

• use a program that can unformat the drive
• use a program that can bypass the newly created FAT and browse disk sectors directly to discover and retrieve data.

To retrieve data from a drive which has been partitioned, you must make use of a program that will read disk sector directly.