Recover Files from an Emptied Recycle Bin

The recycle bin is a recycling container for files deleted from the desktop or Windows Explorer. Sometimes some of your important files are accidentally deleted together with unwanted files and placed in the recycle bin. The problem becomes more serious when your recycle bin is emptied because all the files are gone and deleted. When a file is removed or deleted from the recycle bin, one believes that the file is lost forever. A prompt from Windows tells you that if you delete a file in the recycle bin it will be permanently removed from your computer. While that Windows prompt implies that any and all files emptied from the recycle bin are removed forever, recovery is still possible.

Before beginning the process of recovering files from the recycle bin, you have to understand what happens when the recycle bin is emptied. Files are never deleted when you clean the recycle bin or take out files from the recycle bin. The operating system denies access to these files originally found in the hard drive. The space occupied by the files is then marked available. If the operating system needs space for new files, it may overwrite the space where deleted data lies.

Deleted files are still found on the hard drive. Recovery of files from the recycle bin is still possible until these files are overwritten by the operating system. When a file is deleted, it appears in the recycle bin. This does not mean that a file was physically transferred to the recycle bin. The file is maintained in its original location. It is just the directory entry of the file that has been transferred and situated in a hidden folder called Recycled, and the deleted file is renamed. The original data about the file is kept in a hidden index file found in the folder bin, called INFO2. 

The INFO file is said to be corrupted when you find the recycle bin empty while attempting to recover a file. It is possible to recover a file by searching for the file by name using the windows search function and then renaming the file that was recovered. Another approach is by trying to delete the INFO file from the DOS prompt. This will cause Windows to generate a new INFO file when you reboot. After doing so, you should find the deleted files back in the recycle bin.

When a file is deleted from the recycle bin, it can also be recovered using a third party data recovery tool. This third party data recovery tool has numerous abilities to recover lost data that an operating system does not have.

Immediate action should be done to restore a file, because there is a possibility that the file will be lost if you take long in recovering it. Avoid downloading or installing additional software, as it may accidentally overwrite the files you are attempting to recover. The data recovery software is the only software you should download. The data recovery tools guide you in locating files, looking into files, and recovering your deleted files. These tools also help in recovering files lost when your hard disk was reformatted.