Joe123857

So, after my bookmarks were deleted and I reinstalled chrome, the bookmarks file was empty, I opened it with notepad++ and then saw that it's in json format, that's how I know the file is json despite being named just "Bookmarks" without any file extension. Idk what you mean by "file signatures", never heard this term before And yes obviously I can't complain recuva didn't recover my file, it is what it is, but the fact it couldn't recover a simple text file containing only text, after the file was deleted with a normal program uninstall, and the file was deemed to be in excellent state, makes me doubt recuva's effectiveness, I'm certainly not gonna rely on it for the future. I haven't used file recovery programs till now, cuz I usually never forget to backup, but this time I forgot... And I thought, at least a text file will be recoverable, right? I guess not, but it is what it is, we learn from our mistakes and move forward. I tried using a hex editor (winhex) and searching for "type": "url" which is part of the Bookmarks json file, and I found a few of my old bookmarks with the links and everything (cuz the strings are right after each other, after type: url follows the url of the bookmark), but the majority I didn't find, I suppose they're gone for good now It should be readable, but it's all NULL NULL NULL in notepad++, I tried recovering it a few times, same thing every time, I also tried encoding it in different formats, in some of them it appeared as a bunch of spaces. In normal notepad, the file appears empty, though there is a long horizontal scrollbar, not as if you just created a new txt file Like I said, the folder with these bookmarks files was deleted, and in recuva there was no bookmarks.bak file, only the bookmarks file, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, I uninstalled chrome a few hours ago but I forgot to export my bookmarks first, and there were A LOT of them. And the C:\Users\User\Appdata\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default folder was deleted with the uninstall, so I decided to check if Recuva can do it. Luckily for me, the C:\Users\User\Appdata\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Bookmarks file which contains chrome's bookmarks, was unscathed, recuva says "Excellent" state and "No overwritten cluster detected." However, when I recover the file to another drive, and open it with notepad++, it's just NULL NULL NULL etc. The file is 12kb in size. It doesn't have a file extension, it's just "Bookmarks", but the content is json, you can see it if you use chrome and open your bookmarks file with notepad++, it's in json format despite not having an extension. But for some reason, recuva says the file is completely untouched, yet recovers it in a broken state, how am I supposed to recover the text from it? If recuva can't recover a simple file that contains only text, god forbid if I have to rely on recuva for recovering something harder (I know it's my fault I forgot to export bookmarks)