Recovering files from damaged or reformatted disks - A question about the "scan for non-deleted files" option in Recuva

Recuva
1

What exactly does this option mean? I thought the whole deal with Recuva is to search and recover deleted (yet non-deleted) files, as the information to recover them might still be there. Since the option says it's for damaged and reformatted disks, is that implying that a regular or deep search with Recuva will find files that I've deleted myself, but not the files that have been deleted by a formatting? I'm a bit dizzy when it comes to these things.

The reason I'm asking is because I decided re-launch and re-formatt an old and crashed (read: blue screen) computer a while ago, and then overwrite the complete hard drive with CCleaner and Recuva before I toss it away. I've wiped free space/overwritten the drive with CCleaner several times, as well as deep searched the drive with Recuva to see if there was anything left to be overwritten.

So the questions are: is this option necessary to use (since I never deleted the files on the drive myself before I formatted it; i.e. the formatting deleted them) - and even though I've used both CCleaner and deep search in Recuva to overwrite and securely delete all files after the formatting?

What exactly does this option mean?

Sorry if my explanation might sound a bit confusing, but I'm confused as well, lol. But I hope you get what I mean.

2

If a partition has been quick formatted then a new set of system files will have been written to it, but no other data will have been overwritten. The MFT (for NTFS) in particular will be far smaller then the old MFT. The remnants of the old MFT will remain on the disk. Inside the old MFT will be the names and cluster runs of files which were live prior to the format. These are what Scan for Non-Deleted Files will pick up.

In theory these files will also be found with a deep scan. But a deep scan has limitations: it takes a long time, it will not find multiple extensions, the file name will be lost, and it can't find simple bat or txt files. Scanning for non-deleted files is fast and returns full file info and multiple extensions.

If you have wiped free space after the format and can't find anything with Recuva then it's unlikely that Scan for Non-deleted Files will find anything - except for the new system files. Just try it and see.

3

Alright. I'm not a computer buff so all this is a bit "foreign" to me. But I think I kinda get it.

Thanks for the answer!