In most cases even formatting a drive you can still get data back. I have used various tools of the trade for data recovery while owning a small IT outfit for 10+ years with double that in a related 9-5 career. Deleting a file or even a formatted drive hasn't actually removed any data and it has just removed the index or address table that tells your computer that your file is in X location (and actually in many locations fragmented out). Data is stored fragmented out at times with a bit of preamble and such for the fragmentations. This is one of the ways the recovery software works to recover a file... which takes a very long time in some cases. Regardless, you can format a drive 20 times, even re use the disk during those formats and you can still get some files from the first time the drive was used... as long as it hasn't been written over - indexes and such from different file systems come into the mix here as well. And this is where bleachbit and other tools people have mentioned come in... they will fill a drive with 0's or whatever and actually write over things deleted... but that didn't happen if they are seeing the files in the list there. <I have over simplified greatly, mostly just to point out that if the files are in the list they can probably recover them>