"Experts" plz tell me that is it possible to recover a folder from the following case..

A 150 GB folder was intentionally deleted from a 1TB drive, it contained .mov files. Data is copied to that drive on daily basis.. and once hard drive is almost fully filled by the data to its full capacity.. Never formatted the drive..

If its is possible, then How it is possible? whats the reason that data can still be recovered from such situation?

I would be thankful for a satisfactory answer.

This means data was copied daily after the folder is deleted?

If yes, then data is gone forever...

Software like Ontrack, shows the file.. but i cant not recover it as its trial version.. Some one told me that if u get the file , u have to repair file headers in WinHex..

@omi786,

Are you sure that it shows the file? Or does it only show an old directory entry with that filename?

As hddguy already explained, if a folder is deleted, and then the disk is filled with new data, then the blocks which were originally allocated to the (now deleted) files in that folder must have been overwritten with more recent data. No piece of recovery software can change that. Of course the more of the disk which was not filled with new data after the deletion, the greater the chance that some of the deleted files were not overwritten.

Personally, I think you are confusing (a) seeing the filename in some recovery software, and (b) the actual disk blocks still containing the original file (MOV) data. Those are two different things.

If you believe differently, then please explain where your 150GB of MOV data exists, when the disk is filled with new data, after that folder of MOVs has been deleted. Perhaps there is some misunderstanding about your story...

I am really happy that u ppl help and explain things..

Sir there were 20 files, numbered 1-20.. Ontrack software shows file17, 18,19 and 20.. with its proper size.. New data, after 150gb folder deletion, was not filled 100% on that drive.. Drive is 1TB..

Data in drive when the required folder existed was 600GB
150Gb folder deleted, remaining data 450Gb.. then new of 450-500 gb was copied..
Now i want that 150Gb folder back.. This is the story.. As simple as i can xplain..

Thank you

You may try R-Undelete, if you work under Windows and the disk is an NTFS volume. The main useful feature of this software is that you'll be able to preview the movies in its Demo mode, and if the preview is successful, buy it to recover the files.

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R-Studio Data Recovery Software

your data is gone.

if you copied about 500gb of data after you deleted the 150gb and now your drive is almost filled.

Imagine you have a book and you have the table of contents, but when you get to chapter 1 the pages are from a different book.

You can try some sort of undelete software, but honestly you are wasting your time.

@omi786:

Thanks for the info.

FYI, in this situation, showing the correct size does not mean that the data itself will be correct.


But disk manufacturers give capacity in decimal TB i.e. a 1TB disk has approx 10^12 bytes. Windows (and other OS I know, except some versions of MacOS) list filesystem space in binary units i.e. powers of 2 (strictly these units should be written as GiB, TiB etc., but few people or OS do that in practice - which is where the confusion comes from!).

So an empty approx "1TB" (decimal TB) disk, has approx 931GiB (binary GB) of available space, as reported by Windows.


See above (and the posts from other members). Using the numbers provided by you, the disk must have been filled. Looking in the title you used for the thread, you even included the Windows error message for when drive D is filled: "No free space left in d".

So as others have also told you, this data seems unrecoverable, based on the numbers you have given. However, trying the R-Undelete demo (as suggested by Alt(R-TT) who works for the makers of R-Undelete) loses you nothing except time, so you can try that s/w instead of the Ontrack demo s/w you are currently using. Please tell us what you find!

Note: You must not install that R-Undelete demo s/w (or install any other s/w, or do any other writing) onto that 1TB disk (from which you want to recover data).

Good luck!

Thank you Vulcan.. My mind is clear on this issue.. I will try the R software..

Thank you all..

I'd like to point out one important thing: for your case, if you are able to preview one mov file successfully, that doesn't mean you can successfully recover another one. Keep that in mind when you'll be deciding about buying software.

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R-Studio Data Recovery Software

Why don't you just download Dmde and use it to recover any files you can find one at a time. The free version has no limitation on single file size except you can only recover them one at a time. You can also use the hex viewer function to see if there really is any valid data in those files or others.