Hi everyone,
I am desperate after losing all my personal files after a Windows 11 upgrade. I have tried to use Recuva to restore the files and was happy to be able to find the files. However, after recovering, none of the files can be opened, including .jpg, .xls, .doc, .pdf.
Would much appreciate if anyone has any tip to either recover again and have the files working, or fixing them.
Thanks!!
What type of Hard Drive(s) do you have?
Exactly how did the files get ‘lost’?
eg Was this an upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 that wiped your files? If so then please give us details of exactly what you did.
With a Windows 11 machine the internal drives are most likely to be SSDs, and recovery is very unlikely to be sucessful from an internal SSD.
You can often recover the filenames, but that is all and the actual data has been completely wiped.
That’s just because of the way SSDs work, they are different to ‘spinning’ HDDs and deleted files can rarely be recovered from a SSD.
(You can regard every delete done on a SSD as a ‘Secure Delete’).
It means that making regular backups of your files (to another drive or to the cloud) is very, very, important if you are using SSDs.
There migh still be a very small chance of recovering some files, particularly if your Hard Drive(s) is spinning HDD, but we need to know more about just what happened.
Hi,
Thank you for the reply. Yes, it was a Win upgrade from 10 and 11, which wiped out all C: drive data.
It was an upgrade of Tech team in the company laptop, basically everything was wiped out if not in Cloud / One drive. I happened to have lots of files saved in C: drive.
I checked and it is SSD drive unfortunately 
I was thinking of trying different data recovery applications, but seeing your feedback, I guess it would be very small chance anyhow
There’s 2 things to mention there;
First is that it sounds like a full reinstall which starts by reformatting the drive and then writing everything needed for the new Operating System to it.
That alone is likely to overwrite where your data was on a HDD.
I’ve recovered files from reformatted HDDs and reformatted Thumb Drives, but I’ve never tried to recover anything from a reformatted SSD, I doubt it would be possible. (Because all the memory allocation blocks should get zero-filled to clear an SSD).
Second and maybe more important is the fact that it’s a company computer.
You are usually prohibited by your contract from using the likes of recovery software on a company computer without specific permission to do so.
it’s often/usually a dismissal offence if you get caught. (It can be seen as possible Industrial Espionage).
Seems like not much chance left. It’s a lesson for the future for me to have the regular back-ups though.
On the second point, in this case permission was granted.
Thanks a lot for sharing!