I thought I had safely backed up files to a different partition on my HDD. But when I had to do a Win10 recovery, I found the partition was gone. I ran Recuva with deep scan. It appears to have found almost all my data files, which I then transferred to an external HDD. But the folder structure was gone. Sorting the recovery list by size, I found several files that were about the size of the lost folders. For example, Filename: $BadClus, Path: c:\ , Last Modified: 4/3/2012, Size : 124,035,760KB (124GB), State: Excellent, Comment: No overwritten clusters detected.
I then recovered $BadClus to an external HDD. But when I checked it, $BadClus was a file, not a folder. Interestingly, its size was 0, but its "Size On Disk" was 118GB.
Is there any hope in recovering the folders. I've been very careful not to add any files or programs to the original HDD after the recovery. I've read in other topics, that if path has a ? in it, then the folder is gone. But that does not appear to be the case here.