Deleting a file removes its name from the index and marks its space as available — the contents stay exactly where they were. From that moment a race begins: your files sitting in “free” space, versus every new write the device makes. Deleted file recovery is simply winning that race, and the starter’s pistol fired the moment you noticed.
Everything writes. New documents, obviously — but also browser caches, Windows updates, sync clients politely mirroring the deletion, even the act of installing recovery software onto the same drive, which is the classic self-inflicted wound. A quiet archive disk keeps deleted files for months; a busy system drive can recycle their space in an afternoon.
So the first move is total: stop using the device. Power it down, eject the card, disconnect the drive. Every minute of normal use is spins of a roulette wheel with your files on the table.
On an image of the device — never the original — recovery runs two passes. First the file system’s own remnants: deleted entries in NTFS, FAT or APFS frequently survive whole, returning files with names, folders and dates intact. Where the index is gone, signature carving takes over, identifying documents, photos, video and archives by their internal structure and rebuilding them from the raw sectors.
The two passes together are why professional results beat the free-tool folder of ten thousand unnamed fragments — and why the same job attempted twice recovers less the second time.
On SSDs, deletion triggers TRIM: the drive itself erases the freed flash in the background to stay fast. That means deleted-file odds on an SSD depend on how quickly it was powered down — sometimes everything, sometimes little, decided in minutes not days. Hard drives, cards and USB sticks don’t do this; on them, time pressure is real but measured in usage, not minutes. Either way the free assessment tells you the truth of your specific case before a penny is committed.
Memory cards and USB sticks are a fixed £250 + VAT; single drives of any kind are £300 + VAT. Chip-level exceptions are named and quoted before anything is attempted. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Usually excellent — on a hard drive, an hour of light use overwrites very little, and the entries often come back with names and folders intact. The chances erode with every subsequent hour of normal use, so the machine should be off now and stay off until it’s imaged.
Not at all — the bin is just a holding folder, and skipping it changes nothing underneath. Shift-delete removes the index entry the same way emptying the bin does; the contents persist identically. The urgency and the odds are the same: stop writing, get it imaged.
On a drive you can afford to lose from, perhaps — but understand the costs: installing and running tools writes to the very free space your files occupy, and free tools read struggling hardware roughly. If the files genuinely matter, the professional pass works from one gentle image and doesn’t spend your odds on practice.
Same job, plus detective work — sync clients, permissions changes and tidy-minded colleagues are the usual suspects, and on a NAS the answer may be sitting in a snapshot already. Stop writes to the share, note roughly when it vanished, and we’ll trace which layer lost it and what that layer still holds.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
The race is winnable right up until it isn’t — and you decide which by what writes next. Deleted file recovery for Glasgow: power it down, bring it to Charing Cross or post it in, and let the image run instead of the risk.