Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - How do I Recover Deleted E-mail
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Old 08-13-2012, 03:47 PM
Steve Nagy Steve Nagy is offline
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Figmo is correct. At the risk of flogging the horse: When you delete a file, it is not actually erased. Instead, the sectors that the erased file occupied are simply marked as available. Until which time as you actually create something that uses the sectors formerly occupied by your file and now marked available, your data still exists.

The program I referenced earlier, Recuva, does a reasonable job at reconstructing your file from the physical sectors ... assuming they have not been overwritten with data from a new file. This is essentially what a data recovery lab does. That is why your chances of successfully saving your data depend on running this program ASAP. Every second your computer runs doing something else increases the odds that the data will be overwritten with something new (it could be something as simple as a temporary browser file.)

I think the options in this case are:

1.) Hope that your Comcast mailbox still holds your mail.
2.) Failing that, stop using your computer, install Recuva, and hope that your data hasn't been overwritten.
3.) Sorry ....