Retrieving Files

Is there any way to retrieve a file or folder that you have deleted, and then removed from your recycling bin? Thanks in advance for your help.

Yes, although it depends on various factors such as the size of the file, how much data has been written to the drive since said file's erasure, etc.

Try http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ if you're using NTFS, or just Google for "undelete" - needless to say, don't download or run any undelete utility from the same drive the lost file was saved on, as the fewer writes to that drive you have the better (if it's on your C: drive, it might be worth considering putting the drive into another computer and running an undelete utility from there, since Windows does a lot of writes to the system drive in normal operation).

I remember the good old days of DOS undelete. I used that many times. Good times.

Losing undelete sucked. I can understand why Microsoft removed it, but it still was a pain to live without.

You can still get it if you download the dosutils package. Comes with qbasic and even help :D

I actually used undelete recently. I'd been coding for several hours and then I accidentally rm'd the sauce file. Luckily I was working on a floppy so I took it out, transported it to a nearby dos machine and ran undelete. Why don't I see a similar tool for Linux? Or am i just not looking hard enough?

You can, but due to the multitasking/multiuser nature of linux it might not be all that useful. There's also the problem of all those different filesystems...

You mentioned another pet peeve of mine. MS removed help. Why, damn it, why?

help was awesome. I could never have run any interesting programs if I hadn't been able to look up how to load all my devices into himem.

In contrast Windows help is utterly useless.

Worst thing that ever happened to me was I accidently deleted something, and in the process of it moving the the recycling bin I hit cancel. It trapped half of the files in the recycling bin.
Windows gave me an error everytime I tried to restore. So my only option was delete. But I found a way around it through command prompt and xcopy.