Stay away from this Recuva Recovery, it detects files hidden or formatted from a disk and when you recover the files or recovery on to a new disk every single file, video, photo is dead will not open, play or anything windows does not recognize anything and Recuva will split each file into many other files. how can one photo have four different files in recovery.
i tried finding a way to get a refund but their contact Us just keeps bringing us back to community. well I guess we will be taking this company straight to the social media of failed recovery data and will let every person know this company does not provide any and we mean any promise of repairing any files. and yes we did pay for the home professional recuva .
Funny that .
Personally I’ve sucessfully recovered literally thousands of files using Recuva, so have many, many, other users.
Which suggests that either your particular files are unrecoverable, or that you are not familial with trying to recover files and are not doing it how you should be.
We could probably comment more on why YOU couldn’t manage recover your files if you gave use some more information.
We’d even be able to tell you what (if anything) you were doing wrong, or if the files were probably unrecoverable whatever you did.
For exampe you ask:
Recuva will split each file into many other files. how can one photo have four different files in recovery
the simple most likely reason for that is because it isn’t being ‘split’ - there was more than one copy of the file on the drive and each copy has been found for recovery.
That could be backup copies, or if a file has been edited it could be the different versions.
Remember that as standard Recuva looks for deleted files, any files that have ever been on that drive at any time in the past.
So if you would like some help and advice then please tell us:
To start with:
- Why you were attempting recovery? (Accidently deleted files, old versions of modified files, crashed drive, reformatted drive, something else?)
Why files were lost can determine what method you need to use to try and recover them. - What type of drive were the files on? (HDD, SSD, USB Stick, SD Card, NAS drive, something else?)
- Was it an internal or external drive?
- Were you using the recovery wizard or the advanced options?
- What size are the recovered files? (Are they the size you would expect or perhaps just 1 or 2 KB?)
- Are you running Windows 10 or Windows 11? (or something earlier)
PS. I do already have a good idea of what your issue here probably is, but the answers to the above will help confirm it.
Our apologies for saying Recuva is a scam but misleading maybe.
we are recovering a WD Passport 2TB drive that only had 1.5TB used with half a TB left of space about 60k of files, video, audio, documents we have both windows 10 and windows 11 on it
recovering them to another External WB Passport driver 4TB size
imagine taking good care of an external drive for 18 years and I mean everything is on the line with this, never had any issues, family photos and videos, wedding, our kids photos, 5 businesses documents over the last 18 years saved, website designs, passwords,
Our 2 TB external drive was formatted and had a 2gb OS recovery software put on it when the support not Recuva said it will only need less than 3gb of space and we had about just under half a TB space left on out 2 TB external. the support said not to worry all your files are safe well turns out the external drive was broken into two parts one part for the OS and the other is blank which recuva did find all our files on.
imagine being screwed over by one person to the next for months, some techs just copied the image drive and said sorry we cannot do anything and didn’t even scan all they did was copy the drive we know it was to steal information and we had to pay them $300-$500 for them to steal an image of the drive in less than 10 mins.
Yes we are very upset and we have every reason too when a website doesn’t have an email support other then a forum reading how others also cannot open their files.
Don’t be upset because a paying customer is sharing his true experience especially when this site does not offer a any support email or refunds,
see we waited 18 hours for Recuva to find every file, photos, videos, Microsoft files, everything you name it. once the deep scan is complete the results shown were all green maybe about 100 out of 56k files were red and about 25 yellow. we then clicked the bottom right to recover and waited another 16 hours for the files to be recovered on to a next external drive which is opposite of the external drive that we are trying to recover. once that recovery is completed we tried opening the files each type of files and only files that were visible to working are the windows cursors or key images. any other files windows does not detect and cannot find the file supported. as well some how we have like 4 to six of the same files now ok maybe Recuva duplicates files who knows but when we right click on properties and can see the file size so we know the file is there but cannot open so unless we missed something on this site that says once recovery is completed click this to repair or license the files ect.
we have watched many videos which most videos from Recuva are about two to three years old. which only shows and explains accidents that are small recovery, we were also told by many and we mean many ppl that Recuva could do the job and yes it found the files and yes it recovered the files but what miss leads us is once we got the files none of it opens or reads. even excel or pdf or word not even microsoft office will open or repair or even be supported by the microsoft so all we have are like 2tb worth of dead files but the deep scan said green is recoverable so now what. yes we are upset because of time and paying to use the service for everything Recuva offered and not a single support can be reached or even a refund offered for a service Recuva didn’t hold up.
we had high hope when Recuva gave us the results of all green click recover and waited hours only to find out nothing opens or nothing is supported .
my guess is maybe Recuva cannot do the toughest jobs. so we will say sorry for blasting and ranting and taking it out on Recuva
so what would we do once the files are recovered on a new external drive?
Thanks for that information.
(I’ll change the title to one that describes the issue so it may attract others who may be able to help, but will leave your original post untouched)
Firstly support is available by email, it is part of what you pay for with Pro.
(With Recuva there is no difference in recovery between Free and Pro version, both will do exactly the same job, the Pro Licence is paying for support).
You can raise a support ticket by using the form here: CCleaner Support Community
You can also contact CCleaner support by emailing: support@ccleaner.com
With all that stuff you have backed up on the drive I would definitely want another, seperate, backup copy or maybe even two.
I’m not quite following what you are saying though.
You seem to say that you had some other ‘recovery software’ on the drive but I think that you mean the backup and encription that comes with WD Passport drives?
That isn’t recovery software, that is just making a backup copy, either on the drive itself, or in the cloud, or both.
There is a problem with making a backup copy to a partition on the same drive - namely that if the drive fails then the backup cannot be accessed, because it is on a drive that has just failed.
So are you now saying that the WD Passport drive has failed, WD aur being unhelpful and have washed their hands, and that iswhy you are trying Recuva to try and recover from it?
How did the drive fail? Have you had to reformat it?
PS The multiples that you see of the same files will probably be backups made by the Passport Drives backup function.
PPS. I’m not very familiar with WD Passport drives, never had one, but I do know a few things about them.
On our Dell inspiron 17 inch 2 in 1 after declining the renewal of Dell warranty due to financial reasons we couldn’t renew it.
two days later dell update screen was on when we started up the lap top forcing us to do an update before even getting to our desktop , so we did the update and then there was an issue after an update by dell somehow our network driver was gone completely even when we tried to install the drivers it wouldn’t install.
we paid for dell support assist to help recover and we did a back up on the WB Passport,
dell tech support said we need a external drive to save a operating system so we can re install the dell OS and all we had was the WB passport no thumb drives and the dell support said that will work all it needs is 2/3gb of space which we had about half a TB left of space, he said it fine nothing will happen so we followed his instructions and it started a format and we told him why is it formatting and he said it is just formatting a small space nothing to worry let it do it thing so once it was done all is left on the drive is one portion of dell and its OS and H part empty,
the dell tech disappeared from live chat and we were left with this formatted drive,
we tried to upload the image of the disk it would not allow us to continue to reply until deleted
when we click on H its empty nothing it, recuva found everything but now we are back to when we flipped out bc windows is not recognizing or opening or playing so here we are.
is there something we are missing once files are recovered on a new External drive from recuva?
we have already had dell warranty for three previous on this lap top with no issues on the fifth year last year in 2024 we couldn’t afford to renew the warranty, we bought the dell lap top brand new in October 2018 Windows 10 no issues ever until the update after declining dell warranty
Made a Mistake its an WD Passport external drive
TBH it sounds like poor communication from the Dell support, and a lack of acual ‘support’.
It sounds like they wanted you to make a ‘system image’ of the existing computer before reinstalling the operating system.
But that shouldn’t need any new partitions or formatting, so I don’t know quite why he seems to have wanted to create a seperate parition for it.
However if somehow the drive got reformatted then that may explain why none of the files you recovered from it were usable.
If you want to recover what were the ‘live’ (not deleted) files before the reformat (rather that the deleted files) then there is a special way to do that.
If you think that the whole drive was formatted in error then I suggest that you try this special method of using Recuva to recover files from a reformatted drive.
Note that as Windows can already see your drive then step-2 won’t be needed. (ie. DON’T reformat the drive again if Windows can already see it).
No guarantees of course, there never can be when attempting any file recovery, but if/when a drive has been reformatted.
PS. Just looking at that linked post it appears to have lost an image when the forum had a software change, I’ll try to get it back (or put a new one there, I think I can remember what it was).
In the meantime I suggest that you watch the linked video, that shows all the steps needed to recover the non-deleted files from a reformatted drive.