Even after you have deleted a file, and emptied the Recycle Bin, you may still be able to recover the file. This is because the data in the file has not been removed, at least until the drive is defragmented, rather Windows just ignores the data that is there, treating it as if it was empty space.
The great advantage of this system is that you may be able to recover files that you accidentally deleted since the last time that you defragmented, however, you will need a piece of software that will enable you to reconstruct the file from the raw data. My preferred software for this task is PC Inspector's File Recovery. Whilst free to download and use, it is still a fully featured and powerful piece of software. It is not the most intuitive piece of software ever written, so I will be writing a tutorial later this week explaining how to recover a file using it.
As an alternative, FreeUndelete, is more user friendly, but because I have not used it as often as PC Inspector's File Recovery I cannot vouch for how well it works.
