Limit scan to C:/Programs/Jetbrains

Recuva
1

I would like to recover files from one specific folder : C:/Programs/Jetbrains

I have done the scan on the whole C: drive and it found 771,928 files.
In there I saw many thousands of files from the Jetbrains folder, most of them in Excellent condition.

Ideally I would like to limit the scan to files belonging to that folder and then recover all files tagged Excellent without having to click them one by one.

Thank you for your help.

2

You should specify that only the folder that you want is searched.

See the guide here which shows you how to do that in the recovery Wizard, see the 3rd section “File Location”.

https://support.ccleaner.com/s/article/using-the-recuva-wizard?language=en_US

You might also want to take a look at this video which is a pretty good overall guide to using Recuva (note that he uses the Advanced Options, which can do more than the Wizard but takes more learning).

3

Nice answer except for two things:

  1. While he does show some limited usage of the Advanced Options, he doesn’t show how to limit scanning only specific folders.
  2. I tried limiting to a specific folder, but the software wanted to scan the whole drive anyway. So instead of scanning a single folder with a couple dozen files it wanted to scan 40K plus files in 2.9TB worth of storage.

I wish the software worked as advertised.

4

I think you may have a misunderstanding how computers store files.

You are thinking that all the files in a folder are actually stored together in one part of the drive, like sheets of paper in a cardboard folder.

In reality computers don’t store data like that.

Even though Windows (or any other Operating System) shows you a ‘folder’ to make things look like the paperwork in an office that is just a fiction.

In reality any computer file could be anywhere on the drive partition, a single file can have parts saved spread all over the drive.

The Windows ‘Master File Table’ (MFT) tells Windows where all those bits of files are.

However when you delete a file it is then shown in the MFT as being deleted and so the MFT no longer “remembers” where all the bits of the now deleted file where.

File recovery software can’t just ask the MFT where the file bits were - because the MFT no longer has a record of them - so the recovery software has to search the whole drive to try and find all the possible bits of the file, even if you are only looking for a single file.