Emptied the recycle bin, shift-deleted a folder, or watched a colleague tidy the shared drive into oblivion — a deletion takes down the signpost, not the street. Your files sit exactly where they were, marked as reusable space, and the recovery race is against the next write. First rule: stop using the drive. Second rule: this page.
$ ldr nvme list → Device: Crucial P3 1 TB NVMe → Status: NAMESPACE LOST — 0 MB shown → Client: confidential · Harrogate $ ldr controller-repair → Namespace: rebuilt from flash → Translator: reconstructed → Imaging: 940 GB · 99% read $ ldr verify → ✓ research_data — recovered → ✓ thesis — back → ✓ supervisor — relieved
File systems are lazy by design: deleting a file erases its entry — name, location, ownership — and flags the underlying space as free. The content remains, byte for byte, until something new needs the room. That’s why timing dominates deleted-file recovery: a drive taken out of service within minutes recovers nearly everything; a drive used for a week of downloads, updates and browsing recovers what luck spared. Every action writes — even booting the machine writes — so the correct response to a serious deletion is disproportionate-feeling: power the machine down and bring the drive in, not ‘just quickly install a recovery tool’ onto the very disk holding your ghosts.
A deletion from a network share or NAS skips the recycle bin altogether, and brings a second question with it — whose deletion, when — that snapshots and our forensic service can sometimes answer alongside the recovery. Cameras and cards deleted in-device follow the standard race, with the extra rule of no new photos. And the honest asterisk: on modern SSDs, TRIM usually erases deleted content within minutes — we’ll tell you straight at diagnostic if your case falls on the wrong side of that physics rather than invoice you for hope.
Strong, provided the machine stops right now. An hour of light use overwrites very little. Shut it down, jot down roughly what went missing and from where, and get the drive to us. The recovery lists exactly what's intact before you commit to anything.
Recovery comes first. NAS deletions respond well when the volume reaches us quickly, and if snapshots were enabled it can be close to trivial. The 'who and when' question is forensic work — timestamps, logs, access patterns — and yes, it can ride alongside; say at intake that attribution matters.
There are two routes, with two different answers. Where the file-system entries survive, everything comes back with its names, folders and dates intact. When entries are gone and files are carved from raw content, photos return complete but generically named, sorted by date and camera where the metadata inside allows.