Turn off Immediately if you have Accidentally Deleted a File!

If you have accidentally removed a file on your Windows Vista system, immediately disable the disk defragmenter for all drives or, at the very least, the drive where the deleted file was located.

Normally when files are removed, the files are not zeroed-out on the hard drive; rather the pointers to where the files were located are modified, marking the areas where the files were once located free for reuse. Windows Vista's Defragmenter, when performing drive optimization, may notice these now free locations as areas where data can be placed permanently, or as temporary areas to hold data when moving information from one location to another.

Either way, if the space previously located by the files is reused, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to recover your information. Thus the faster you can turn off disk defragmentation, the better. Then attempt to use a file recovery software package (hopefully one you have already installed or one you can run off a portable device) to attempt to undelete the files.

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1. Recover deleted files (02/25/2010 23:32:41)

That's interesting - it never occurred to me that defragmenter would complicate things, but it definitely makes sense.
Aside from that, users should basically do as little as possible before recovering their files - save nothing else!

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Windows Vista - Disk Defragmenter

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