Data Recovery Case File · Formatted & Logical Faults · The Installer Landed in the Free Space

Recovering Deleted Files After Installing Recovery Software

Her enquiry was honest about a mistake she had already half-corrected, and the honesty makes it easy to help. "I've accidentally permanently deleted about 40 important design files — Illustrator and After Effects — from my Windows laptop and hard drive. I didn't realise that third-party recovery software can make things worse, so I installed one and tried it out on a file or two, but stopped using it. I need these files recovered soon." Two things to give her. An honest assessment of what that install actually cost, which is less than she now fears but not nothing — and the reason her stopping early genuinely mattered. And the variable she has not mentioned that will decide the outcome more than anything else: whether the files were on a solid-state drive or a conventional hard disk, because on one of those the odds are good and on the other they are poor regardless of what software anybody installed.

The decode: what the install cost, and the variable that decides everything

Why installing recovery software on the affected drive is harmful: the logic is simple once seen. Deleting a file removes its listing and marks the space it occupied as available. Installing any program writes new data — and the operating system writes new data into exactly that available space. So a recovery tool installed onto the same drive as the deleted files is writing its own program files into the region holding them. It is the one piece of software guaranteed to be pointed at the wrong place, and it is installed there by people acting entirely sensibly, because nobody explains this at the point of download.

What it cost her, honestly: proportionate to what was written, and that is genuinely encouraging. A single application installation is a modest amount of data — not trivial, but a small fraction of a drive's free space — and she stopped rather than running repeated scans or, worse, letting it write recovered files back to the same drive. The files most at risk are those whose space happened to lie where the installer landed, and with forty files spread across a working drive, most will not have been touched. Had she left it installed and scanned repeatedly for a week, this page would read differently. Stopping was the correction, and it worked.

The variable she has not mentioned: whether this is an SSD or a hard disk, and it matters more than everything above. On a conventional hard disk, deleted data persists until physically overwritten, so her files are very likely still there and recoverable in full. On a solid-state drive, the operating system tells the drive which blocks are no longer in use and the drive clears them in the background within minutes — so deleted files are often genuinely gone regardless of how careful anyone was afterwards. Most laptops of recent years use solid-state storage. That is not a reason to give up, because the outcome is established by examining the drive rather than assumed, and design applications leave more traces than most software. But it is the thing that should be checked first, and she deserves to know it before spending.

Where the extra chances live: design applications are unusually helpful here. Illustrator and After Effects both keep auto-recovery and temporary working files in system locations separate from the documents themselves, and project files often reference cached previews and linked assets stored elsewhere. Those locations survive deletions of the originals, and they are searched as a matter of course rather than as a fallback.

On the bench

The machine was imaged write-blocked on the Atola TaskForce 2 immediately, freezing the drive as of the moment she stopped using it — the single most valuable thing available at that point. The storage type and its background clearing behaviour were established first, because that determined what could honestly be expected. On the image, deleted directory entries were recovered where they survived, and OSForensics carved the free space with format-aware handling for the design file types, so project files were recovered whole rather than truncated. The application auto-recovery and temporary locations were swept in parallel, which returned working versions of several files whose originals had been overwritten. Everything was validated by opening in the applications that made it.

The outcome

The design files recovered from a write-blocked image and from the applications' own auto-recovery locations, validated by opening and delivered. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT, no recovery, no fee. The decode, for anyone who has just downloaded a recovery tool: installing it onto the drive holding your deleted files writes its own program into the free space those files occupy, which is why the advice is always to run such software from a different drive and never to let it write results back to the affected one — but a single install, stopped early, costs proportionately little and is very much recoverable from; the variable that matters more is whether your storage is solid-state, where deleted blocks are cleared in the background within minutes; and design applications keep auto-recovery files elsewhere, which is often where the win comes from.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.