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)_/¯