Cause of loss · a file that has gone
People ring from all over Plymouth about the file. The question that matters is which drive it lived on. On a hard disk, deleting strikes the name from the index and marks the clusters as free; the bytes written inside them stay exactly there until some other file needs the room. An SSD will not wait. TRIM sets the controller emptying those cells on its own account, usually before you have decided what to do next. Both are dealt with further down.
You will be talking to an engineer
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| What happens | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Gone, and the Recycle Bin is empty too | Nothing ever went into the bin — Shift+Delete, a card, a stick, or a file above the limit | Put nothing more on it |
| Bigger than the bin allows | Windows removed it immediately; it never sat in the bin | The contents are usually still there |
| Missing from a camera card or a USB stick | Cards and sticks have nowhere to keep it; the entry goes at once | Take it out and stop |
| Everything vanished after a sync | OneDrive or the like has brought down a deletion made on another machine | Look in that service's own online bin first |
| A folder you open daily, now empty | A deletion, a sync conflict, or a second profile | Power it off before you start hunting |
| It is an SSD, and it has gone | TRIM reaches the controller, and those blocks are emptied within seconds | Take the power off now |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
Left switched on, a computer writes to its own disk from morning to night and asks nobody — thumbnail caches, browser files, an update quietly unpacking. Those writes go wherever space is free, and that free space now takes in your file. Which is why the disk comes out for imaging.
Where the index has survived, the names, dates and folder structure come back along with the contents. Where it has not, each file is carved from the image on the signature bytes its format begins with.
A count of files on a report proves nothing at all. Everything recovered is opened and inspected, and anything you flagged as important is checked on its own.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
One keystroke, two completely different clocks: on a hard disk the bytes stay where they were put, sometimes for years, until another file wants the room. Do it on an SSD instead, whether a WD Blue or a Seagate BarraCuda, and TRIM will have emptied the cells inside minutes. Identical action, opposite results. Which is why the drive gets asked about before the file does.
A year of accounts left an office machine near the Barbican in one keystroke, bin included. Imaging was done that day; the index was rebuilt from the copy and not from the original, and the folder returned intact, filenames and dates along with it.
That is settled by the medium, not by the file. On a hard disk the contents stay exactly where they were until some other file needs those sectors, and the majority of these come back. Where TRIM is enabled on an SSD, the drive clears those same blocks by itself, frequently while the machine is still powered up.
On a hard disk, no. The only thing it skips is the waiting room. Both routes free the identical clusters and leave the bytes lying inside them. The bin was a convenience from the start, not a safeguard.
There is not. Confirm that prompt on a camera card, or on a stick, and Windows acts immediately, keeping nothing in reserve. The data itself generally stays put in the flash, and the flash is what our tools read — chips rather than directory.
It tidies up after itself. Once the file system is finished with a group of blocks, TRIM passes that on, and the SSD empties them ahead of the next write instead of during it. None of this shows on screen. That is why an SSD leaves you minutes where a hard disk leaves weeks.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.