Hi,
I've just downloaded Recuva to try to recover a huge file (157GB). Recuva detected it and with status "Excellent", so I selected it and started recovery. After more or less 13% (around 19GB), it stops saying recovery completed successfully, but the file is not usable. Why is it not recovering the whole file? My filesystem is NTFS.
Thanks in advance.
If you've found the file after running a normal scan, it's probably because of the way that NTFS handles large file deletion. Files over 4gb in size have their datruns (the cluster start and cluster count numbers) overwritten. If the file has many extents any MFT extension records are overwritten too. This results in the file being shown in Recuva as zero bytes in length and Recuva won't attempt a recovery.
If you've run a deep scan then you will only be able to recover one file extent. In other words Recover can only find the starting cluster and then continue reading clusters sequentially until it hits another file type, when it stops.
Did you run a deep scan? Did you find the file by file name or some other means?
In both cases the file cannot be recovered by any practicable means. This is an NTFS characteristic and applies to any recovery software.