Recuva found my file and says it is in excellent condition, but excel wont open it

Recuva
1

Here is how the line item looks in recuva:

Kellis gifts.xlsx h:\?\Excel\Todd's Things\ 12/3/2017 19:45 23KB Excellent No overwritten clusters detected.

When I try to open it in Excel I get this error:

The file you are trying to open, 'Kelli's gifts.xls', is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you still want to open the file now?

When I click ok, the file opens ( I can see the Excel tab i created when I made the file) but the worksheet is blank, no data is showing. I thought if I changed the file type from .xls to .xlsx that might work, but then i got this error:

Excel cannot open the file 'Kellis gifts_1.xlsx' because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file.

Im not sure what to do from here. any suggestions will be much appreciated !!

2

There's quite a lot on this subject in the forum. Briefly, Recuva goes to the cluster addresses in the file table and retrieves whatever is there. If those clusters have been overwritten at some point (but not now), or the address has been corrupted, then the recovered data is not worth whatever it's written on. You could try a deep scan, but this won't reinstate file or folder names.

3

Ok.......so based on the data I have provided, the file is really gone and cannot be recovered?

4

Nobody knows. It depends on the time that has passed since the deletion, and what activity has taken place on the volume. A deep scan might be lucky, see if you can match files with an xls (xlsx?) extension with a similar size and recover those. You might be lucky.

5

well i tried the deep search, but no luck. thanks for trying to help. The thing that makes me angry is that I have a seagate slim portable backup drive and when i tried to restore the backup, my files were not there. The folder was there, but there were no files.

6

Dear Piriformboy9317,

Sorry I can't answer your question BUT I also have experienced a similar problem leading to my dissatisfaction with Recuva and Microsoft Office. The former unhappiness was due to the files being unrecoverable and the latter because the loss was due to Microsoft (changes to its OS).

Once again, I am sorry for my lack of expertise to help you and hope that someone else will be able to do so.

Anonymouse