How far back do data recovery software programs go?
A few years ago I deleted photos from a time in my life that I THOUGHT I wanted to forget. Now that I’m a little older, it would be nice to have photos to remember that time in my life. I’m thinking about buying a software recovery program but I’m not sure how far back they typically go on my hard drive. Any advice?
Update:
The data recovery software worked like a charm. I ended up using File Scavenger and was able to find my old files…plus many, many more! Thanks.
Physical time has nothing to do with it. It all depends on if the space those pix were on have been over-written or not.
When you delete something it is kind of pushed aside by the hard drive until that space is needed again, then it gets over-written by other data. You might try a free recovery software first. Here’s a link you can check out for recovery software.
http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0.html?query=data+recovery+software&tag=srch&searchtype=downloads&filterName=platform%3DWindows%2CWebware&filter=platform%3DWindows%2CWebware
Typically these photo recovery software http://www.stellarinfo.com/digital-media-recovery.htm(Windows) or http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-photo-recovery.htm (Mac) can recover your photos from past 10 years or more if data have being not overwritten, if data is overwrote software can not recover even 1 day old data. So its only depend how frequent you overwrote your system.
Recover My Files data recovery software will recover deleted files emptied from the Windows Recycle Bin, or lost due to the format or corruption of a hard drive, virus or Trojan infection, unexpected system shutdown or software failure.
Good tool: http://www.recovermyfiles.com/