A simple question with, well, a detailed answer.

That's what's coming up on this episode of Hands On Tech.

Can you recover files that have been permanently deleted?

Stay tuned.

This is Twitter.

Hello and welcome to Hands on Tech.

I am Micah Sargent in my singing mode, and this is the show where I take your tech questions

and do my best to answer them, sometimes with an accent.

This week's question comes in from Sheila,

and Sheila has asked a very simple question with not a lot of detail,

but the good thing is, this simple question is one that I've had,

that I'm sure you've had, I'm sure people have asked you,

can you rescue a file that has been deleted permanently? Well, Sheila, it is quite possible. Oftentimes you can, but your chances depend entirely on how long ago you deleted the file and what has happened on your machine since you deleted the file.

We're going to kind of take this step by step.

And if you watch the show every week, you will have heard my little

sermon a couple of weeks ago, I think, about how we as tech troubleshooters are like scientists

running experiments to try to figure out what's going on. And this is the same kind of thing.

There are multiple experiments that we can do, but think about it

like having a budget, right? The budget in this case is desire to complete a project. It is, you know,

the activation energy. And so we like to start out with the easy things first,

before we go with the more difficult things that are a little bit more involved or a little bit

more costly. I'm not saying this to you because I think you haven't done this. And I am not

...