Hi, I've used and waited Recuva recover my deleted files from my formatted external hard drive for 15 hours. But in the end, I can not be happy for long while all recovered files are unopenable (or useless). Can someone tell me what I can do next please? Thanks for reading.
Sadly no recovery program can promise the definite full recovery of previously deleted files. This is true for the free softwares (such as Recuva) and this is true for $500/hour cleanroom recovery.From Wikipedia article on Data Recovery
So while recuva might mark something "excellent" this may only indicate that the majority of fragments seem to be in a whole state. Excellent does not means the same as definite.True Example: I reformatted over 40 GB of mp3s on a 200GB hard drive. I immediately ran both Recuva and a competitive software I was able to recover about 1/5 of the data as "excellent" or its equivalent. Between the two softwares (non-concurrent) runs, the scan and recovery took roughly 72 hours. Sadly however about 3/4 of the recovered songs were either too broken to even open or were partial or multiple songs crushed together. However I was successful in regaining a few (1/20th) of my lost I'd say the programs did their jobs.Much of the time a file can be reconstructed (carved https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_carving ) but even this does not always guarantee recovery...nothing can guarantee it.Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and the space they occupy is made available for later overwriting. For the end users, deleted files are not discoverable through a standard file manager, but that data still technically exists on the drive. In the meantime, the original file contents remain, often in a number of disconnected fragments, and may be recoverable.