External Hard drive data recovery question

[touvaj10]

I have an external HDD drive that a large amount of files deleted accidentally. I was able to cancel it but within a second or two of the deletion 75% of the files in the folder were already deleted. What I'm wondering is, if there is a time limit in which a file recovery program must be used in order to try to recover as much files as possible. Or will it be fine if I wait as currently I need a new hard drive to recover the files onto. If it matters, I don't plan on using the hard drive until I am ready to recover therefore no writing or reading from it at all. Currently I don't have a hard drive ready or the time to recover it right now (approximately 2 days of estimated time to recover).

 

[kanewolf]

IF you cleanly shutdown that accidentally deleted hard drive and leave it disconnected (nothing new written) then time to recovery doesn't matter. It only matters if things are written to the drive and overwrite your deleted data.