Greatest time savings can be made by knowing when to best stop a search. Most drive recoveries can be completed in less than 2 hours will all files recovered. How long should it take to recover a formatted drive? If you have suffered data loss, minimize the use of the computer until such time as you have finished your data recovery efforts. Once a deleted file has been overwritten by new data it has been destroyed. A deleted file will reside on the drive up until such time as the space it occupies is used to store new data. How long will a deleted or missing file stay on my drive?