I need to recover zero-byte files

I have intentionally created zero-byte files. They are simply stubs of media files but serve an important function. They have zero size by design. The folder with these files has been accidentally deleted, and Recova sees these files perfectly but refuses to recover them, probably because it thinks these used to be files with contents that have been overwritten.

This is is not an uncommon use case. If Recuva is unable to undelete these files, please consider adding this feature.

1) Find a live version of one of these files, copy and rename it.

2) Open Notepad, select Save As, file type Any, save as whatever name you wish.

I suppose you're going to say you have 20,000 of these files. It may be possible for Recuva to create a new zero-byte file with the same name as the deleted file, but I wouldn't wait for that to happen.

I have a hard time understanding what you wrote. I know how to create dummy files, and I already have a list of deleted files, because Recuva allows you to export these files as a text file. I need to actually restore them, not to create new files and rename each one manually. And yes, there are hundreds of these files, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.

It blows my mind that Recuva doesn't allow something that's this simple. Do developers or company employees read these forums?

I assume you mean the tenor of my post, not the actual meaning. We have no way of knowing from your original post either your skill level or the number of files to be recovered. Company employees do read this forum from time to time, but I wouldn't translate that into action of any kind. I would think that in your case you could look for another application that does recover zero-length files.

I ended up re-creating these files via a batch script using the exported list as reference. Not ideal, because I lost original time stamps, and Unicode filenames came out as gibberish so those had to be done manually.

If anyone from Piriform is reading this, please consider the use case described in the OP. I could not find another recovery app that would do this easily.

You probably couldn't find a recovery program because recovering zero-byte files would be a unique use case. Many probably never considered it.

Also since they're zero-bytes in size it wouldn't take any significant disk space to make a backup copy by zipping them into a single ZIP archive, and save that backup onto a portable hard disk or USB flash drive.