Is file recovery possible?

 zh  <-- 萌萌哒！换去华语！

 This is part of the "7 common misconception about computing" week series. 

Your memory is eternal, and so does your files in the hard disk. Therefore it is quite possible to recover files from a hard disk just like how Hollywood teaches you.

Piriform have a pretty useful tool that allows user to recover all the files upon deletion. The recovery step is pretty simple, just fire up the software and allow it to scan. Your old files are showing up again.

How could that possible? The way operating systems usually delete a file is remove a 'pointer' that points the file to a chunk of codes in your hard disk. It's like tearing up the index of a book so it would be harder to search for a specific chapter.

File recovery is the way to rebuild the 'pointer' by looking for the chunk of codes. It's like rewriting the index for that book. The lesser the old data is covered by the new ones, the higher chance of data recovery.

If a file recovery is possible, what are the safety ways to completely remove the files from your hard disk? First off, you can just keep copy files into the hard disk you want the data to be 'forgotten', this will cover up the old data chunk per chunk and the old data will gone or at least to the state of unrecoverable. Or, you can use CCleaner (From Piriform) to remove the old data. You may use their Disk Wiper feature or use the scanner with Wipe MFT Free Space enabled.

 Just Remember 

File recovery is possible, if you do it immediately after deletion is done. 

There are a lot of software that can help you to recover files, and software to wipe out the files.