hard drive question

[harrywantstoknow]

can i retrieve everything i have ever deleted on my pc using a recovery software or something

 

[Corwin65]

Short answer no.

Recently deleted maybe.

 

[boosted1g]

Not quite how recovery works.

So when you delete a file you have not actually removed the file from the drive. All you have done is cleared a "marker" in the header of the file that says its space CAN be overwritten. This causes the windows file manager to no longer display the file and allow it to be overwritten but the data for the file is still on the drive.
Since a hard drive is using magnets even if you have the hard drive do a full format (turn all binary 1s to 0s) there is still trace magnetic field so with the wright software tools you can recover a lot of the data.

So you can use recovery software to find the files that are "deleted" but not yet overwritten, and you can get more advanced software that can find the trace information of data on the drive.
However after the data has been overwritten a couple times there is no ability to restore the data. Thus you can't just use recovery software to see the file you deleted in 2012.