I had thought when I watched one of CSI: NY techies use his magic touch to access the victim's laptop hard drive, which had been cleared of all files, he still wouldn't be able to retrieve any of stored information and the investigation faced a dead-end. However, several scenes later, the techie reported that he was successful in undeleting- the deleted files! The process was long but most of the information needed on the investigation, was retrieved. I thought it was all Hollywood magic spun to fit the script. I never thought it was true until I came across an article (Recovering Deleted Files and Deleting Securely) prepared by Shil1978.

According to the article, after hitting the delete button or mousing over the file then right-click delete,  doesn't necessarily mean the file was completely deleted. Our computers still have the image of the deleted file on the hard disk. Even reformatting the hard drive wasn't enough to make the file irretrievable, not unless the free space was overwritten with new data. Only then whatever file was deleted will stay gone. So, what are the softwares out there that will help recover data?  The article gave an example called Tune Up Utilities. To read the rest of the article, visit this link. For me, I have not need of this program yet but I'm filing this for future references. ☺