Hi. I ran the file recovery tool, it showed over 290K deleted files available but on completion the table was empty. I tried thumbnails just to make sure, still no files or folders showing as available. Can anyone help that’s experienced this? Thanks
i would go with there are no files to recover.
What type of drive is it?
How were the files lost?
Were you using the recovery wizard or the advanced options?
It’s the hard drive on my Lenovo laptop. I was forced by OneDrive to delete files from the OneDrive area of my hard drive so I could use my emails again. Unbeknown to me, as well as deleting from OneDrive they also deleted them from my main folders on the hard drive. They then added further files to obstruct recovery from the recycle bin on OneDrive. I reset OneDrive to stop it uploading files but lost a lot of image files from their recycle bin which just vanished within a couple of days and couldn’t restore them. Yes I was using the deep scan. I since, did a regular scan and about half of the lost files so far are retrievable but still major setback as most of those lost were images with descriptions of things I was about to list for sale with my online business, many of which had been researched and valued (stamps, coins, books etc)
By type of drive I meant was it a HDD or an SSD or …?
That’s becuase if it is an internal SSD then you have virtually no chance of recovering anything from it.
SSDs work in a very different way to older types of drives, and files deleted from an internal SSD have virtually no chance of being recovered, and it’s not very promissing with an external SSD either. (It gets technical but basically it’s bacause of the SSD ‘TRIM’ function).
However even if your drive is a HDD the way you say that things happened here you would not have been able to recover the deleted files anyway.
You say that:
You were deleting some localy stored files (the ones that were also in One Drive) from your drive, to free up space on the drive for other (email?) files some files because the drive was full.
Once you had freed up the space it was then it was filled up again with the other (email?) files, thus overwriting whatever had been there before so there was then nothing of the deleted files left to recover.
At that point any chance of recovering the deleted files had gone, you had overwritten whatever was in them.
As you did have One Drive enabled then normally a copy of those old files would still have been stored in One Drive, but somehow you had managed to delete that copy too, and then also managed to delete them from the One Drive recycle bin by resetting One Drive.
PS. I suppose that you have looked in the recycle bin on your PC, or had you cleared that too?
All in all it’s a unfortunate trail of one misstep following another that has removed your files permenamtly.
No recovery software would be able to get the files back after that.
(They will still find the ‘Master File Table’ record of where the deleted files used to be, which is how Recuva could tell you there had been over 290K of them, but the files data is no longer there because new file datahas been written over it).
Sorry but those files are gone, however there are now a couple of things that you may want to look at:
1- If you had run out of space on your drive them it’s time to get a larger drive or a second drive fitted. If you don’t then you are likely to run out of space again sooner rather than later.
2- Regular backups to your own external drive could have saved your files, if they had been on an external drive then you could have just copied them back.
Unfortunately many people don’t think they need to make their own backups - until they lose a load of files and can’t recover them, after which they usually start doing backups.
There are different types of backup which I won’t go into here, there is plenty of advice out on the web.
Just to end, I think that as said you may need more storage, if so then it’s likely that One Drive may shortly be asking you to delete files again.
Here is some guidance on how to delete foled from local One Drive on your PC but not from One Drive in the cloud. (I don’t know the software that are selling, this link is provided just for the info).