Iced_Caffeine

It's interesting how "Normal file deletion" was checked and Recuva said the chances of recovery were "Excellent" and yet this issue still exists. But I should have been paying more attention to what I was doing. I read in another thread that someone learned a long time ago to use their Downloads folder as a temp folder and anything they cherish was moved to other places for safe keeping. Some great advice.

Yes, it's an SSD. I wonder if that's an issue. Does that explain the problem to you right away?

Hello, so long story short early last month I ran CCleaner and it deleted what was in my downloads folder. I wasn't aware at the time that CCleaner caused that, since I haven't ran it in a while and I didn't know that feature was added in. So I used Recuva to get the files back and what I noticed was even though the files were restored, they cannot be properly accessed. Meaning that the file size of each individual file is intact and the whole folder is quite large, but every file seems to be un-useable. I wonder what the reason is for this. I would love to be able to access and use all those files again, but I'm also more interested in understanding how a normal file deletion could make all those files un-useable. I don't run CCleaner that often and at the time I was not aware that one of the options on the check list before you run it allows you to delete what is in your downloads folder. So I definitely won't be doing that again!