Hi mstovall,

 

Welcome to the Webroot Community,

 

If you used the right-click option "Permanently erase with Webroot" then I highly doubt it.

 

There are some recovery utilities out there like "Recuva", but I'm not sure it will help.

These utilities can recover files if the space has not been written over already, but in this case, I think Webroot does rewrite over the space, hence the "Permanently" verbiage.

 

Regards,

BD

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I've always wondered where deleted USB files were placed....:S

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Hi BlazeTen,

 

Normally when files are erased they aren't truly erased, rather that space on the hard drive/USB drive is reallocated as available for use again. It could be minutes or years before that particular space is reoccupied again, depending on how often you write/erase files and how full you fill the drive. Some utilities can write the drive full of zeros as a way of actually erasing files, too.

 

I accidentally erased files from a USB and was able to recover them, but I had just used the usual way of deleting files in Windows (right-click/delete) and had not written anything to the drive before recovering. I know there are forensic recovery options but they are very expensive and still won't guarantee they will retrieve your files.

 

Have a good one,

BD

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@ wrote:

Normally when files are erased they aren't truly erased, rather that space on the hard drive/USB drive is reallocated as available for use again. It could be minutes or years before that particular space is reoccupied again, depending on how often you write/erase files and how full you fill the drive. Some utilities can write the drive full of zeros as a way of actually erasing files, too.

Interesting @, I didn't know this. Learn something new every day on this Forum. 😃

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It's also different if you have SSD drives as TRIM or the Drive Controller will clean the said spaces so they can be reused. The old data has to be removed before it can be rewritten over again.

 

Daniel

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@ wrote:

It's also different if you have SSD drives as TRIM or the Drive Controller will clean the said spaces so they can be reused. The old data has to be removed before it can be rewritten over again.

 

Daniel

Yes, Daniel. Thanks for pointing that out. SSDs are a totally different animal, so to speak. I'm slowly switching the OS drives in all of my computers to SSDs. No need to defrag SSDs either. The huge peformance increase using SSDs is well worth the added cost, imho.;)

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Looks like BD is right I've just tried deleting a.jpg file using each of the 3 settings in Webroot and Recuva failed to recover the file on each setting.

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Correct BD you shouldn't Defrag SSD's as you would wear them out sooner and there is no benefit.

 

http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-defrag-secrets-for-hard-disks-and-ssds/

 

Thanks,

 

Daniel

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