A Strange experience with Recuva 152 Portable

[maanojrakhit]

I had huge quantity of files in Documents and Pictures folders, which I lost under the following circumstances:-

Windows 10 wouldn’t simply boot from any of the two hard disks. rescue disks, system restores, boot files on and portable drive, nothing worked.

Under such hopeless condition, I clean installed Windows 8.1 using my DVD, and activated the installation. Next, I installed Avast Internet Security and Windows Updates. Finally, upgraded to Windows 10.

I also checked my 130 GB OneDrive but most of it had become empty, they were not even in the Bin of OneDrive. Clean install may have wiped out all my data. OneDrive Sync may have brought its contents in line with empty folders on local drive. Why I couldn’t find them in OneDrive Bin is another question?

At this point, I wondered if Recuva could help me recover my lost data from two hard disks C: and D:?

Experience with Recuva for C: drive 1 TB 92% Free space

When I selected all items (Excellent, Very poor, and Unrecoverable) and pressed the button "Recover" on the right bottom corner, Recuva gave me the above message. Necessary: 2397 GB, which would be close to 2 TB. The point is I never had so much hard disk space. The maximum I have is 1 TB (C:) that Recuva scanned. I cannot figure out how the software could have retrieved 2 GB deleted data from 1 TB physical drive?

Then I selected only those files which were categorized as Excellent, and hit the Recover button at the right bottom corner of the page. Recuva had found over 3 million files, of which about one million were in excellent category, and yet on "Recovery" it could get only 2 files. I find it strange and do not understand how and why?

Besides, if it could recover only two files, which were they? For, it did not reveal the names/properties of those 2 files.

Experience with Recuva for D: drive 160 GB 60% Free space

I looked through the list of those 12231 recovered files and found these files are basically of Type ActiveX control, ADML File, Application, Application extension, Cabinet file, Configuration settings, Control panel item, CSS Document, DAT file, Device driver, File, GIF file, HTML File, INS File, JavaScript File, JSON File, Manifest File, MUM File, NLP File, P7X File, PNG File, PRI File, PTXML File, Rich Text Format, RSLC File, SafeZone Web Document, Search Connector, Security Catalogue, Shortcut, STACHE File, SVG Document, System File, Text Document, TMP File, True Type Font File, Windows Markup File, WINMD File, XBF File, XML Document, XML Digital License.

I could have used CSS Document, GIF file, HTML File, PNG File, Rich Text Format, SafeZone Web Document, Text Document. So, I double clicked at some of them, selecting randomly, and found that the output has nothing but garbage. These random selections were from only those files which Recuva had categorized as Excellent.

[Augeas]

It is quite possible to recover more data than the physical size of the disk. Files which have been deleted (prior to your problems) can have their data clusters allocated to other files, perhaps several times, that themselves have subsequently been deleted. The entries in the MFT will all point to the same data clusters. Recuva will recover those clusters for each of the files, thus recovering more data than the disk can hold.

We have no idea what selection criteria you used to recover two files. Which were they? Look in the folder you recovered them to.

Recuva will recover the contents of the clusters allocated to the files. It doesn't change one bit of the data, whatever the extension is. If the recovered contents are garbage, so is the source content.