[How can this happen??]

1 hour ago, Augeas said:

Give us a clue, is it FAT32?

Sorry, NTFS.

 

[How can this happen??]

7 hours ago, Andavari said:

Disk activity can cause it. If it's the drive that Windows is installed on then Windows and/or an installed software could have created or updated a log(s), etc., or something updating itself in the background such as antivirus, etc.

Doesn't matter how long something has been on the disk, to Windows it see's empty available disk space and can use it.

That's why it's always important to have backups.

 

Let's make sure you understand.   This is on an EXTERNAL USB drive; not a system drive, etc.

 

Have several dirs on the disk   dir A, Dir B, etc with files on them.   Do a backup of many files to a new dir C.  

Accidentally delete dir C.  Run recuva IMMEDIATELY before any new data can be over written.

Recuva shows shows a few unrecoverable files that were over written from files in Dir A and/or Dir B. 

These two directories were on the drive previous to the accidental delete of dir c and NOTHING was added to them

Again I wrote NOTHING to the drive (and I doubt Windows did either) between the time I accidentally deleted dir C and ran Recuva.

 

How two existing files can be moved ON TOP of freshly deleted files is what I don't understand.