Dear everyone, I've just had iCloud delete 17 GB of data when synchronizing my local files and my online cloud. I'm wondering how to use Recuva to get them back. I just recently deleted the files, didn't do anything else in terms of installations but install Recuva. Now, I've made a scan, and I'm finding a lot of documents and different files, but I'm looking primarily for pdf's, excel files and word files, which I can't seem to be able to locate in between all of the different files that the recovery program has found. Is there a way for me to just focus on finding these types of files? I'm finding lots of hpp files etc., but nothing in terms of the papers, and texts that I'm looking for. It's mostly scientific articles and papers I've been writing, but I am as of yet unable to find them back in the Recuva list. All the files were located in two folders; is this helpful in narrowing down where I'm supposed to be looking to find these files?
If anyone can help me out, that would be greatly appreciated. I'm drawing a blank here and I'm really hoping to find these files back, since it deals with about 3 years of study and work related articles that I really need to get back. Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.
Alright, I've found the button for scanning just documents in the wizard (-_-), and I'm now doing a more targeted search. The fact that I couldn't find the right files before also may have something to do with that I was only scanning in my documents, which isn't necessarily where the files were located. However, now I'm scanning in the entire pc, and I'm going to have to wait 6 hours before the scan is done. My question is the following: would I be able to significantly reduce the time this search would take place if I specified in advance the paths in which the deleted files were located? Since I know where they used to reside, I should be able to do this, I'm just wondering whether this would speed up the process considerably. Moreover, does anyone know whether there is a risk of aborting the scan when having started? I'm a little worried that the program might end up corrupting files I have on my PC. Does anyone have any experience or advice in this regards, and can tell me my fears are unfounded?
Thanks in advance!
I haven't been able to recover anything non-corrupted. Nothing is readable anymore, of the files that were deleted by iCloud Drive. Is this just what it is or can I still do something about this? I'm in dire straits. Thanks in advance for any advice.
I can't speak to iCloud specifically, but usually if one of those cloud backup tools "helpfully" clears space on your local device, the cloud-stored version is still recoverable by syncing the relevant files back to your local drive again?
Doing a regular scan will usually execute fairly quickly (my 500GB SSD found 177,000 files in just a couple of minutes). A deep scan will find more things, but lot of those will be older files that have already been at least partially overwritten. If there are files you are expecting to see at least a trace of that are not showing up at all, try checking options such as "show files found in hidden system directories" under Options > Actions.
With regards to file recovery, as of version 1.53, the function of Recuva is to recover, but not repair deleted files. Note a problem if the files are in an "Excellent" recovery state, but if the contents of the files have been partially overwritten, then that portion of the content has been permanently lost and what comes back may be corrupted:
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In the case of photos, opening them in different image editors (that aren't too picky about corrupted files) can often get most of the image back (https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/209176787-How-can-I-recover-photos-#issues-when-trying-to-open-recovered-pictures).
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In the case of Microsoft office documents, anything saved as a .docx, .xlsx, etc is actually a zip archive containing a collection of xml files. Under some circumstances may be able to retrieve at least some of the contents of a corrupted file by opening them in 7zip (or your archive viewer of choice). Microsoft Office also has an "Open and Repair" option that can sometimes recover some data.
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