IMac

Backups are a job for tomorrow The files I want to recover show a file size of about 2,500kb with an 'unrecoverable state', and comment 'File's data could not be found on the disk'

Hi, There is no windows.old folder as to why - a couple of years ago laptop did a Win 10 upgrade, crashed a few days later, got it back up onto Win 7, and has been a bit dodgy ever since, routinely starting up with 'preparing computer for first use' message, which went away after a couple of mins and reboot continued normally. The other night on switch on it came up with 'reinstalling windows' now I can see some - if not all the programs, but all files have gone, iTunes shortcut is still on the desktop, but is looking to reinstall

Sorry, yes it is RECUVA I am trying to use.

Hi, Laptop decided to reinstall Win 7, programs still seem to be there, but files have gone, mostly Excel and Word, I installed and ran Recuva, (free version) it has found loads of files, quite a lot are not overwritten and come up about the right size in the list of files available for recovery. When I check the files to recover, all seems good, but all that is actually in the folder is a shortcut to the file, not the actual data. Any ideas????