[ketanco]

HI, I am trying to see if I can look at which files I copied recently from my hard drive into an external drive. The info on external drive is now gone. But I want to know what files I copied (or even more, when I copied), as there were so many and I can not remember exactly which ones...Is there a way to trace that by looking at the hard drive or somewhere else in my computer, if so how?

[spot]

Which copying tool did you use? Who wrote the operating system?

Assuming it was Windows Explorer on XP or Vista...

No, there's no explicit log of filenames kept on a drag-and-drop copy. That doesn't mean the information isn't on your hard drive, it just means you can't find it.

At a guess it will live for a while where - and if - it was written as part of virtual memory. There won't be a file header to get you there but the file names would show up on a text scan of the drive surface until they got arbitrarily overwritten.

At a guess there'll be a genuine, possibly deleted, file in one of the Windows temporary directories showing the directory tree and filenames copied, built by Windows Explorer and timestamped at the time of the copy. The fact that it's deleted doesn't mean it's been erased.

In terms of the question you asked, no, you can't trace the information. In forensic terms it's potentially still available.