Alfpham4le

OK - thanks for your quick response. Of course this is not the answer I was hoping for! I am at a remote location and do not have a spare 4TB drive sitting on my desk. I do, however, have more than sufficient space on my existing drive to hold a fully restored set of files, once the unneeded space taken up by deleted files has been released. A smart process of progressively restoring the files would be the ultimate Recovery tool. Isn't this how Defragmentation works?

Hello Recuva - newbie question / request ... I Used Shift Delete on a large area of My 4TB hard drive and immediately fired up Recuva. I want to recover the approx. 3TB of "Excellent" status files rather than sort and select (this will take a long time). There is about 500GB free space on the drive, so I am hoping that during recovery the program will ... 1. Use truly free / blank space, recognise drive areas used by files yet to be recovered, and then 2. Reclaim the additional space needed by overwriting areas used by files from the list that have already been recovered. Is this how Recuva works, or will the process turn Excellent files into Unrecoverable scraps? Thanks in advance for your help!