The Issue of Time

The sooner you try to recover a lost file or application, the better. Every moment that passes, each operation you run, and each additional disk write that is done after a file is lost decreases the likelihood that you’ll be able to recover that file.

Unfortunately, however, you may not discover a file is missing or corrupted until days or weeks after it happens. Make a point of identifying your most important files and go to the trouble of checking on them to be sure they are present and they open properly. Conscientiously back up your files off the main hard drive.

When personal computers were relatively new, you often heard the saying that a hard drive was like an electronic filing cabinet. In many respects, this is still quite true, especially since many users keep vital information that normally only exists on paper tucked instead into the 1s and 0s that populate the binary world of our PCs.

But the file-cabinet comparison is only accurate up to a point because you can exercise more control over the organization of your physical filing cabinet and how things are placed in it than you can effectively impose on your hard drive. The physical condition of the hard drive itself, combined with the properties of the operating system and the file-indexing system (usually the file allocation table or FAT with Windows consumer versions), control the actual “filing” process. You can tell Windows where to save a particular file but how that information is written to the platters making up your hard drive is pretty much out of your hands.

In addition, it seems easier to make digital bytes disappear than to make a piece of paper disappear. I say this with only a bit of sarcasm, because it’s really quite true. Unless you consciously throw away a piece of paper (or even burn it), you’re apt to see that piece of paper resurface every time you move things around in your home and office (probably making you think each time, “I really ought to throw that away or file it”). With your PC, you don’t have to hit the Delete key to make a file disappear. You could save it to the wrong folder or location (in which case it’s there but missing to you) or another situation might cause the file to temporarily disappear, such as a poorly behaved application you’re using to create or modify that file, or difficulties with your PC where the PC crashes before the file is properly saved.

Over time, the contents of a single file can get spread out, or fragmented, across the platter of a drive, making the file slower to open or problematic once you do get it loaded. You may even see some of the types of corruption mentioned earlier in this chapter in a fragmented file.

The same holds true for your applications. The files that support the application may get fragmented. An application that ran so well when it was first installed may load more slowly or display odd behavior (for example, it can’t find a file that is obviously present). This problem sometimes cannot be corrected by regular disk maintenance. In the worst case scenario, it’s better to back up the data, then uninstall and reinstall the application—effectively rewriting it to the disk—to get it to work the way it did before.

When you do something like accidentally delete a file in Windows, which (unless you configure it otherwise) goes into Recycle Bin, the physical placement of the file on the disk may move. This means that the original space it occupied may be overwritten by other files as they are in turn written to disk. And if you erase files outside Windows, from Recovery Console or from the Command prompt, for example, these files don’t go to the Recycle Bin. Their space may be immediately overwritten by other files.