My first real experience of using Recuva.

Recuva
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I thought I might just pass on this info, which may or may not help anyone trying to get back recently deleted files.

I've never had cause to use Recuva until one day last week when my bad, well ingrained habit of using shift\delete, jumped up and bit me very firmly on the bum.

I intended to delete 2 albums I'd grown tired of, but a slip of the mouse and before I knew it I had block shift\deleted 35 albums from my partition.

Fired up Recuva and scanned, and every single track showed up, so I selected them all and pressed "Recover", saving them to my other partition.

I only managed to get back about two thirds of the tracks, and they were all over the place order wise. Try again.

Changed the view mode in Options to "Tree View", and under "Actions\Recovering", checked "Restore Folder Structure".

Scanned again, and now I had my music folder, and a list of albums containing tracks. Selected all and tried recovering again. I recovered all albums, but most of them were missing quite a few tracks. Damn. Try something different.

I decided to deselect all, and to check and recover one album at a time.

Bingo! Using this one at a time method, I recovered every album with every track intact.

Why this worked when mult-recover didn't, I don't know.

Because I did the recover immediately after my slip up, I expected everything to be easily recoverable, and everything was, but only when I recovered them a small section at a time.

Hopefully, someone may find this info useful.

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Yes Dennis I'm supprised you haven't use Recuva before even just to see what it does.

Changed the view mode in Options to "Tree View", and under "Actions\Recovering", checked "Restore Folder Structure".

Thanks for the tip on checking "Restore Folder Structure". I've always used it without being checked.

Now there is something about Recuva that always puzzles me. I installed CC, Defraggler and Recuva on a friend's laptop. I showed her the settings for CC. I showed her how DF works and I showed her how Revuva works. I did a scan and it shows 22,000 plus files it had found. I thought because DF had never been used and her drive was like a cullender after I Defraged the drive it would find less files. It didn't it still showed 22,000 plus files. ;)

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It was only a matter of time Keith before I did something daft. Shift\Delete is really a bad habit.

As to it still finding 22,000 files after defragging, I'd say that was a pretty good effort.

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Keith, if you're using Recuva normal scan then the file list comes from the entries in the MFT marked as deleted. After defragging the disk the MFT might be consolidated in fewer places but as I understand it the marked-as-deleted entries remain just as they are, so you will get more or less the same number of files found. I have read that the MFT is similar to a relational table (or tables) and contains relative offsets, so the deleted entries can't be removed or, shall be say, defragged. It could be close to the truth.

After defragging you will probably have a far less chance of recovering anything, even if the filename count is similar.

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Good ''real experience'' post to link to for posters trying to recover music.

Glad it all worked out Dennis.

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Thanks for the info Augeas. ;)

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Good ''real experience'' post to link to for posters trying to recover music.

Glad it all worked out Dennis.

Thanks hazel, I was one very relieved and very happy bunny.

:)

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Yes Dennis I'm supprised you haven't use Recuva before even just to see what it does.

I forgot to answer this bit Keith, apologies for that.

Of course I've used Recuva before to do just what you suggest, to try it out. I try out every new version.

But as I said in my post, this was my first "real" experience of needing to use it, and 35 complete albums was a bit more of a challenge than the unimportant random files I've previously recovered in trying it out.

And the trial and error recovery process was something I never needed to do with small test files, which is why I thought the info worth passing on.

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I just wanted to thank the OP for his most helpful post. I accidentally deleted 586 mp3's (from 347 different sub-folders) this afternoon, thinking I was simply removing the files from a playlist when in fact I was (unwittingly) deleting them from my hard drive. I usually make backups, but this one particular song folder changes so often, backing it up seemed somewhat impractical to me -- at least until I saw that I'd lost songs it had taken me a month to collect.

It had been so long since I'd lost any data, at first I never even thought about using Recuva, even though I had it on an old laptop. So I started to put more songs onto the drive from which all the other songs had just been deleted (fortunately, only 4 songs). Then I stopped and remembered about Recuva, and the possibility of maybe salvaging some of the songs. I got the latest version and did a deep scan on the 2 TB internal HD. It took 6 hours, and when it was finished, I followed the directions from this post, and was able to recover 549 out of the original 586 songs. I recovered the songs, in their proper folders, to another partition, checked to make sure everything was correct and that the files played properly, then I copied them back to the original drive.

All in all, I consider the results to have been a HUGE plus, especially compared to the prospect of losing all 586 songs. And, if I hadn't added the 4 songs to that drive before running Recuva, I probably could have recovered/restored even more. But it goes without saying...I'm a LOT happier now than I was this afternoon. B)

And to celebrate, I made sure the backed up files were totally synced with the originals, and I will continue to keep the backup folder current, so if something ever happens again, I'll have a full backup already in place. Using Recuva to restore accidentally deleted files is great, but nothing beats a routinely updated backup folder. I considered this to have been a warning. And I don't need to learn this lesson twice.

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And the OP thanks you in return for taking the trouble to pass on the details of your experience.

I'm really happy it worked out for you.

:)

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LOL I almost feel into the not reading post dates thing, on this one

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And the OP thanks you in return for taking the trouble to pass on the details of your experience.

I'm really happy it worked out for you.

:)

Well...anyone who's ever lost important files knows all too well that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach once it hits you that they're really really really gone. In my case, it wasn't just the actual files themselves. But rather, the fact that the folders served as sort of an index for hundreds of new artists that I'd just started to listen to. Once it sunk in that they were actually gone, and not in the recycle bin, or somewhere else on my hard drive, the thought of rebuilding that kind of index from scratch was unsettling, to say the least. Then after I saw what a great job Recuva did getting back the bulk of the files/folders, along with seeing how helpful this thread had been to me in getting the program to do what it does best, I couldn't help but post, in the hope that it might help someone else down the road avoid that most excrutiating feeling of "there one moment...gone the next". :o

Two things really stand out: 1. Install Recuva on your system and have it there in case you need it at some point down the road. 2. DON'T DO ANYTHING ON THE DRIVE (like adding new stuff, etc) BEFORE RUNNING RECUVA. I know this was an older thread...but hey...sometimes certain things -- like user error and great freeware programs that help compensate for user error -- are just timeless.

;)

Cheers!

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Great info, although I'm now baffled by statement about recovering small sections at a time rather than recovering ALL. I ran Recuva (24 hours) to recover over 29000 files (including Videos, Photos & Music) in full swoop. Now I'm concerned that there may be some files missing. I'm not really concerned about the videos & music, but the Photos is more important than anything else. So it seems I will have to try and recuva each photo folder one at time just to be on the safe side to make sure it tries to recover every photo. I'm not saying it has missed anything in the one step approach, its just that I have no way to confirm that every photo was recovered and by recovering one folder at a time I will then be able to compare and see if it indeed recover more files or if it covered the same number of files.