A common misconception is that when you empty deleted files from you recycle bin they are gone forever, but don't think someone with the right software couldn't recover many of the deleted files. When you delete a file from you computer what really happens is that you are deleting the computer's knowledge that the files exists. Think of it as if you were to remove you name from the city phonebook. If someone were to look for you in the phone book they wouldn't find you. But you still live in the city, you've just been removed from a directory listing. Now if the person was really persistent they could drive around every city street knocking on doors looking for you. Given enough time, they would eventually find you and they would likely keep your address so they could find you in the future. Software to recover deleted files works much in the same way. The recovery software searches you entire hard drive for files that aren't listed in the "phonebook" of the hard drive and lists all the "unlisted" files it found for the user to recover. One problem with this software has been that files are rarely stored in one spot on the hard drive. For instance one half of a picture might be stored at one address on the drive and the remaining part of the picture is stored at another address. Some new software has recently been created to help with this problem. It goes one step beyond traditional recovery software and tries to patch together these broken files giving the user the original pictures. Confused yet? Try reading the original article here for more information.
The bottom line is that if you've accidentally deleted important files there is a chance you can get them back, google "file recovery software for more help." But the flip side is that if you want to removed files never to be accessed again, you are dong to need to do more than just empty them from your recycle bin.
