LOCK SCREEN

I ran Recuva on a 12TB HDD that I accidentally formatted. After about 12 hours it notified me that it has found many files. I locked the user and left, but I think my computer went to sleep. Now the Recuva process appears to be stuck at 50%. Should I start over? I have not turned off my PC besides the standby mode yet.

12tb? Are you a commercial enterprise?

A normal scan should not take too long to analyse, as it is reading the MFT only. I don't know how many files there are on 12tb but even if there are a few million the scan should only take a few minutes (if it gets to stage 2 or 3 you can cancel the scan and still see the results without any apparent deleterious effect).

If it's a deep scan then I guess it will take forever. Users with 2 or 2 tb disks complain that a deep scan takes days, so 12tb?

If Recuva did finish, and found multiple millions of files, what human brain could sort that out? I doubt if I could.

Well, it was just a 12tb that I stored my steam library and other games. Destiny 2 is 90gb... so it's easier than you think to fill up a 12TB with personal stuff like a 4tb movie library and family photos and videos in 4k.

But yes I am pretty sure I picked deep scan. I knew it would take quite a while, but my main concern was if the standby/lock would impede my progress that I have run for about 2 days or should I start over? If it takes a week to complete I might as well restart unless I can determine that my progress has been maintained.

This is where the scan has been stuck for some time now

recuva scan.png

No one knows whether it will stagger back into life or not, nor could we say whether a stop and start will have the same problem or not. It's up to you.

However, if the disk has been formatted I would cancel the job, go into advanced mode, select Options/Actions, uncheck Deep Scan, Check Scan for Non-Deleted files, and run the scan again.

.... when I canceled, I went to advanced mode settings and turned off deep scan and then the drive was just identified with no scan... much faster :P. But it actually did not find anything. I guess restarting a deep scan it is then...

Did you check Check Scan for Non-Deleted files? If you have nothing in the Filter/Path box then it must find something.

I did have the non deletet files and it found 5.

You should be finding at least 20 $ system files. Too late here to continue (and I'm out of ideas).

This drive had no system installed on it. Just a separate storage drive.

Thank you for your help tho. Much appreciated.