I did a deep scan on my thumb drive / flash drive and it found all the photo files that had been deleted on it. But, now I can't open them... it tells files are invalid... I put them onto a different drive like I was told to do... How do I get the files to work... thanks.. captkirk
A deep scan runs a normal scan first by default. If the files you are looking at come from the normal scan (they will be listed first, with full file names), and if the file system is FAT32, then the cluster addresses may be amended on file deletion making file recovery very difficult.
If the files are from the deep scan (no file names, just a number) then the files may be fragmented. Recuva will only recover the first fragment of a file.
In both these circumstances it is not possible to recover the files successfully.
I have a related question, if I may I was wondering what the different colored dots beside file names mean after the deep scan is done? Is it possible to recover files with red dots beside them?
Green means that the file's clusters have not been overwritten, orange that some have, and red that all have. You can recover a red dotted file but the contents will be invalid.
All the files I recovered look like this... example: 9a137e.rbf. I know these are my photos, but I can't get them to open. What does this mean? Thank you for your time.
I have the same problem my files had the right file name and extension but still won't open so what is the purpose of finding these files if we can't open them
Recuva will recover whatever is in the clusters pointed to by the file entry, or in the case of a deep scan, whatever is found directly at the cluster level. It's a byte by byte copy. If what is recovered is rubbish, then what's on the disk or card is rubbish. Recuva can't make any decision on the veracity of the data. Both FAT32 and NTFS destroy certain elements on file deletion which makes recovery more difficult.