Edit:
Fantastic answers, thanks all for the insight!
In: Technology
Imagine your hard drive as a big notebook. When you want to write something, your operating system finds either a blank page or one that has junk it can erase and writes the data there. But in order to find that file later, it needs to write a “table of contents”, a list of each file with the page number it belongs on. When you go and delete a file, your OS is lazy and just erases the filename from that table of contents. That means that the data’s still written in the book, the OS just doesn’t know where. So data recovery folks will just ignore the table of contents and go look through the pages one by one till they find the data they want to recover.
There’s also ways to recover data even if you told the OS to go erase the actual data, very similarly to how using an eraser on pencil still leaves indentations and smudges where the writing was.
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