Changing computers & restarting deep scan

Recuva
1

I am in the process of recovering an external 1.5 Terabyte HDD which was inadvertently quick formatted. Until using Recuva, the drive has not been used at all. After 6 hours it indicates 16% done, capturing 1.5 million files, estimated time left 1 day.

Problem is, Recuva is running on my “main machine” which I really need to put to other use. I have another computer and could restart the process and just let it go “forever” if necessary. Before doing this, though, I have two questions.

#1 – Would stopping the deep scan on machine #1, installing Recuva to machine #2 and restarting the scan using #2 cause any loss of files already scanned (thru machine #1) ?? Or, to put it another way – Does stopping a Recuva deep scan return the drive to its “original condition” ??

#2 – I understand Recuva writes a “working list” of files found as it goes about its business. Could that file be copied from machine #1 to #2 and possibly save some repetition in the new scan ??

Really need to get as many of those files back as I can, but need to use my main machine, too. (#2 doesn’t have the horsepower needed for the work waiting.)

Thanks for any help.

2

And now it's saying TWO days to complete. HELP !!!

3

Stopped deep scan on machine #1 - tried to save what it had found which eventually erred out and stopped. What WAS saved crapped out when I accessed it. Reformatted destination drive.

Started deep scan using machine #2 - preliminary numbers appear to be the same so I'd guess no changes were made to the quick formatted drive by Recuva. First guess says 23 hours to process.

Planning to let it run to completion and see what I get. If it starts going 3 or 4 days, though, well, just have to deal with that if it happens.

4

It looks as if you've found out most of what you were querying. If a Recuva scan is stopped then that's it, a new scan on any machine is a fresh start. Recuva does not amend anything on the source drive, so cancelling and starting afresh can be done ad infinitum. You can save the list of files found to a text file, but that's all it is, a text file, so it's of limited use.

A 1.5 tb disk has around 350m+ 4k clusters, so a deep scan of just about all of them (the disk has been formatted) with a search of each cluster against a table of file signatures, will take some time (at 1,000 a second that's over 100 hours).

5

(Status update) Ran out of virtual memory. Had to increase page file size and restart. Seems to be running a little slower this time for some reason but seems to be progressing normally. (First time through, step 1 took about 48 hours about 50 hours on step 1 this time and showing 86%)

Tip - Even if it seems to be doing nothing, give it plenty of time. The process indicators don't tell the whole story by an means.

6

(Final Update, Caveats and Hints)

Recuva found about 1.5 million files for potential recovery in the first pass.

In list view, I arbitrarily check-marked everything, then sorted on the “Comments” column, went to the bottom of the list, highlighted the last item (overwritten), then scrolled up until I found the end of the “Excellent” entries. Did a “shift-click” on the first overwritten entry, then de-selected all the overwritten files. (This took about 1/3 or 1/4 (at least 20%) of the potential files out of the picture.)

Everything from this point on was done in Tree View.

IMPORTANT NOTE – After running Recuva once to completion and not being able to access the destination drive, a bit of reading indicated I should set the recuva.ini file to re-create the folder structures. We live, we learn.

Selecting folders one or two at a time, I ran the recovery until I was satisfied with the results. (Skipped the Recycler and System Volume Information folders.)

Some files could not be recovered because the resulting path plus file name combination would be too long, probably because of the difference in the name of the original drive and the longer name of the destination drive. (To avoid this as much as possible you could shorten the name of the destination drive as much as possible before doing anything else.)

There was one “possible recoveries” file with a question mark for the name. I created a folder on the destination drive and directed the recovery of those files to it.

In the end a total of 1.16 million files were recovered in a total of 42,200 folders and 287,000 Mb. (I didn’t get a count of the overwritten and un/deselected files,) Time involved - 40-48 hours to scan (per attempt), 15 hours pick, choose & recover.

I have to say ******** RECUVA DID ONE HELLUVA JOB ******** once I finally figured out what I was doing. Took a good long while as it was deep scanning a 1.5 Tb drive and recovering to a 1Tb drive, all through a USB2 circuit.

Was all the blood, sweat and tears worth it? How important are your files?

Now I can go about finding the data I need for itemizing and get my taxes filed.

Moral of the story / Long story short – BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP, and don’t be purging files when you’re tired.