Cause of loss · deleted and missing files
People ring us from across Cardiff about the file. The answer turns on the disk it was sitting on. Take a hard disk: deleting removes the name from the index and releases the clusters, and the contents lie there until another file wants the room. An SSD is not so patient — TRIM has it clearing those cells on its own account, often while you are still deciding what to do. Both cases are set out below.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| Warning signs | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| The file has gone, the Recycle Bin is empty | Never went to the bin at all: a stick or card, Shift+Delete, or a file past the size cap | Put nothing more on it |
| Larger than the bin allows | Windows removed it on the spot; the bin never held it | The bytes are normally still in place |
| Gone from a memory card or a thumb drive | Cards and sticks hold no bin; the entry is released immediately | Unplug it and leave it be |
| Everything vanished after a sync | A deletion made elsewhere was mirrored down by OneDrive or similar | Start with the deleted items on the web |
| A folder you open daily, now empty | Deleted, a sync conflict, or another profile | Power it down before you go looking |
| An SSD, and the file is gone | A TRIM command follows, and the controller empties those blocks within seconds | Power off immediately |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
A switched-on computer writes to itself all day without asking: thumbnails, browser caches, an update staging itself in the background. Any of that can land on the sectors you need. The disk comes out of the machine and an image is taken from it.
Where the index survives, the folder tree, the names and the dates all come back with the contents. Where it does not, files are carved out of the image by the signature bytes each format begins with.
A count on a report proves nothing at all. Every recovered file is opened, and the ones you named as important are ticked off by hand.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
One keystroke, two very different clocks: on a hard disk the deleted bytes stay exactly where they were written, sometimes for years, waiting for another file to want the room. Move the same file to an SSD — a WD Blue or a Seagate BarraCuda, say — and TRIM leaves those cells empty within minutes. Identical action, opposite result. Which is why our first question is about the drive rather than the file.
A year of accounts vanished from an office PC in Cardiff in one keystroke, bin and all. The disk was imaged that day, the index reassembled from the copy instead of the original, and the folder came back whole, every name and date in place.
That depends on the medium, not on the file. A hard disk holds the contents until another write claims the room, so most of these jobs succeed. An SSD running TRIM tidies the same blocks away by itself, sometimes before you have shut the lid.
Not on a hard disk. All it does is miss out the holding stage; the clusters are released either way and the contents stay put in them. The bin was a convenience, never a safeguard.
It does not. Confirm the prompt on a card or a stick and Windows acts straight away — no second chance held back for you. The bytes normally remain in the flash, though, and that is where our tools go looking rather than at the file list.
It tidies as it goes. TRIM passes the controller a list of blocks the file system has finished with, and the drive empties them quietly so the next write is not slowed down. Nothing appears on screen while that runs, which is why an SSD gives you minutes.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.