Accidentally reformatted 3TB USB drive. Installed Recuva, and ran deep scan which quickly found 28,283 files. However, after 7 hrs run time, still on 1st stage, 1percent complete, the time estimate is ticking up, currently at 18 DAYS. Does this sound like normal operation?
I think that the first batch of files found is the normal scan which a deep scan runs first, zipping through the MFT. However a deep scan has to look at and anaylse every unallocated cluster. Three tb is huge, and at 4096-byte clusters it would take 8.5 days even if it could anaylse 1,000 clusters a second, and it's probably processing at a far lower rate than that. Being USB connected will slow it down as well. These disks are just too large to backup, too large to recover.
So I'm out of luck out of luck trying to restore this drive?
Thank you,
CJ
I wouldn't want to dissuade you, but you will need perseverance.