Hello all , we have used the free version of Recuva and it seemed to bring back files in question, file names, type and file size all good, but none of yteh documents open. When we run the scan again it doesn’t find anything that it found first time, any ideas or is it a lost cause now…thanks
What typ of drive are you recovering from? (HDD, SSD, USB stick, other)
Why are you trying to recover? (Accidental delete, crashed drive, reormatted drive, other)
How you use Recuva (which options to use), and what chance you have of recovering files depends on just what kind of drive it is and what happened that lost the files.
You do say that you got some files back and the size looks as you’d expect, which sounds promising, but that they won’t open.
What type of files are they? (Images, video, documents, spreadsheets, other).
I note that you do say ‘dicuments’ so what format (fike extension) are they?
Have you tried opening them using different apps?
Have you tried any ‘File Repair’ tools?
Hi, the user profile was deleted from the machine, the actual hard drive type is SSD, we got a lot of files back which looked good until we tried to open. xlsx, docx, pdf, yes we have used Office repair, text file recovery and also tried notepad, wordpad and adbe reader for pdfs. We have ran the recovery again and none of the files are on the machine now. But we do have a copy of the first set of files we recovered, they just don’t open, none of them…
Ouch, recovery of deleted files from an internal SSD is problematical and rarely sucessful.
(However it sounds that you may have been lucky here).
That’s because the TRIM and ‘garbage collect’ functions of a SSD act to fully overwrite any deleted data so that it is not recoverable in the same way that it would be from drives like HDD, USB stick, or SD card.
It’s just the way that SSD technology works.
(It does make it doubly important when you are using SSDs to make regular backups of your files to another drive or to the cloud).
Whilst there is usually only a very slim chance of recovering deleted files from an internal SSD if you can get to it before a ‘garbage collect’ runs then it is just possible.
(Usually that would mean turning the machine off ASAP and taking that drive out so that it wouldn’t get garbage collected, and you could then work on recovering what you could from it as an external drive).
If you leave the drive in the machine then, as you have found, TRIM/garbage collect will do it’s job and overwrite the data, ie. the file data from the deleted files has been completely wiped.
In this case though as you appear to have recovered something then it looks like you may have managed to do that by good luck.
KEEP THE FILES THAT YOU DID RECOVER SAFE - Make copies of them even though they are not currently opening. (I do see you say that you have already done that which is good).
Are the files that you have recovered the sizes that you would expect them to be?
Occasionally you can only recover the filename or the file header but not the full data, so that is an empty file.
As your next step I suggest that you try some of the free online file recovery sites to see if they can fix your recovered files (somethimes there is not a lot wrong with them*), just put “repair Corrupted files online” into a browser search and you should find plenty of choice.
*As an example, if they were images then users here have found that the free Irfanview image viewer/editor can often open recovered images when other viewers just say that they are damaged and refuse to open them.
Once opened in Irfanview and re-saved again the other viewers will then open them too.
Keep your originals safe and work with copies of course, and if one online tool doesn’t work then you can try another.
PS. There may be an extra issue if you use Bitlocker or some other encryption tool; because the recovered files will still be encrypted.