When a file is deleted on your computer, only a pointer to the file is deleted. If so, why does it take so long to recover it? I coincidentally format my flash drive which used to have about 500 GB of data. The format process takes approximately one minute, but the recovery process takes me a night (I think it must be more since after an hour, the process only reaches 2%, which means it will take 50 hours to reach 100%). I understand that it needs to scan the whole drive because you don't have the index, but even copying all those data doesn't take that much time.
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Because the file is fragmented. If it is taking 50 hours to recover its unlikely to be recovered. – Ramhound Feb 16 '15 at 13:04
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Formatting a flash drive and deleting a file are two completely different things. – David Schwartz Feb 16 '15 at 13:14
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@DavidSchwartz why are they different? – Ooker Feb 16 '15 at 15:03
2 Answers
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A file could be scattered in pieces on your disk. So when you delete the file, those pieces are still there but orphan of the entry on a table that permits to find them. To "undelete" the file it's needed to scan all the disk.
When you format a disk you're erasing a table, not erasing the entire disk. After the format, the files are still there.
jcbermu
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As Ramhound pointed out in the comment, files can become fragmented which means that they don't take up one contiguous space in a medium. When you delete the index to a file, the recovery program has to now look through the whole medium to find every piece to be able to put it together. This is for just one file. Imagine how long this process is for every single file.
Hayko Koryun
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