I have a network drive (T) which points to a folder on my C-drive. I accidently deleted an Access database (.accdb) from the T-drive. I was shocked to discover that the file was not in my recycle bin. A friend recommended Recuva and I tried it within a few minutes after the file was deleted. I did an all-files scan limited to the folder on C where that file was. Recuva scanned over 500K files, but nothing appeared in the recovery window. So I tried a deep scan, which took over 2 hours. The deep scan found 295 files in that folder but none newer that 2 weeks ago.
Recuva, and most other recovery software, can't recover from network drives. They must be physically attached drive that windows disk manager has assigned a letter to. Mounting a drive to a folder (or mounting a folder as a drive letter) is not enough to allow the software(s) to access it.
with lack of definitive info, it sounds like the file was deleted, then the laptop went online, did some browsing, and eventually you downloaded and installed Recuva.
if true, the OS would have been accessing the newly available space made by the accidental deletion to save your browsing and download data onto.
which would make recovery all that much harder (like it wasn't a black magic art form to begin with )
it sounds like you can access the C:\ location that T:\ was mapped to but have no results.
that may be due to the drive being accessed after the deletion or something to do with how T:\ drive was setup or used.
when you say T:\ is a network drive, you aren't talking about it being a physical external unit are you?
that is what I naturally assumed. if all you did was map network drive and set T as the drive letter for \\w520\c\arts then it's not a network drive (per say), you've just assigned a drive letter to one of your folders.