Where To Copy your Recovered Data?

I recently had a call from a customer who had tried used our DART File Undelete software to recover their data. Unfortunately once he saw his data, he then clicked copy and selected to copy it back down to the drive he was trying to recover from.

He had a good reason for why he did this; the main drive in the machine he was running the software on did not have enough room for all the data he wanted to restore. What I had to explain to him was the first rule of thumb with deleted files; never write anymore data to the drive once you realize you have deleted something important. 

The reason for this is Windows wants to write to areas of the drive it has written to before first. (go ahead and take a second to read that again LOL) The reason that they do that is in an effort to keep the file system contiguous, since people do not defrag often enough. So if you find yourself in the situation this customer was in it is better to save off little bits, check the data, and then write it off to CD, then it is to put any data on the hard drive with the deleted data.

NOTE: Even surfing the Internet on a machine with deleted files could overwrite them.