Or are they deleted forever
on a windows 8.1 laptop
There are certain tools that can be used to restore a lot
There are journal-leading file systems…
even for Windoze… Z. B.: https://de.wikipedia.org/...wiki/Btrfs
because you could z. B. Take a snapshot every 5 minutes and then delete it only after a year… So nothing is accidentally changed…
In Windows, the files are not deleted directly but only the space on which they were stored as freely marked. If nothing else has been stored in these places in the meantime, the data is still there. You can restore them with the Recuva program.