How it was lost · deleted & vanished files
On a mechanical drive, deleting removes the signpost and leaves the field: your data sits untouched until something new is saved over it. With a modern SSD it is the drive itself that starts clearing those cells, within seconds. Which type you own decides everything, so we've set out both below before you post anything from Exeter.
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| The error | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| Missing file, empty Recycle Bin | The bin was bypassed — by Shift+Delete, by a removable drive, or by a file too large for it | Put nothing more on the drive in question |
| This file is too big to recycle | The bin was skipped by Windows and the file removed outright | What was inside is usually still there |
| Deleted off a USB stick or SD card | No Recycle Bin exists on removable media — the entry vanishes at once | Eject it, then set it aside |
| Everything vanished after a cloud sync | A deletion elsewhere was mirrored down to your PC by OneDrive or similar | Check the provider's online bin before anything |
| A working folder that has turned up empty | Deletion, a sync conflict, or a profile switch | Power down before you go hunting |
| Deleted from a solid-state drive | Windows sends TRIM; the SSD quietly zeroes those blocks, often within seconds | Pull the power now |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
A running system writes constantly — caches, updates, thumbnails — and any one of those can land on the sectors holding your lost work. First move: the drive comes offline and gets imaged.
Where the file table survives, your files return with names, dates and folders intact. Where it doesn't, we read each file type out of the image by its identifying bytes.
Counting recovered files is easy; we open them instead — and check the ones you told us mattered most are actually among them.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
Two drives, two clocks: on a hard disk, deleted data lies where it fell until new writes cover it — sometimes years later. On an SSD with TRIM active — a Samsung EVO, a WD Blue — the cells are typically cleared within minutes, often seconds. Same keypress, opposite endings, which is why our first question is what the file sat on, not what it was called.
A single confident keystroke took a year of accounts off an office PC. The drive was imaged the same afternoon; with the file table rebuilt, every filename and date in the folder came back exactly as it was.
On a spinning drive, usually — so long as nothing new gets written. On an SSD with TRIM, often not: garbage collection can have cleared the blocks within seconds. Which of the two is inside the machine really decides it.
The Recycle Bin is skipped, yes — but on a hard drive your files sit there exactly as after any ordinary delete. The bin was never what preserved them.
No. On removable media, Windows counts a deleted file as gone immediately and permanently. Yet the data itself often still sits in the flash chips — and that's exactly where we recover it from.
An SSD tidies deleted blocks on its own so writes stay fast — that housekeeping is TRIM. It runs quietly behind the scenes, which makes SSD deletion the single case where hours genuinely matter.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.