I ran Recuva overnight for a total of 10 hours. Despite hogging 100% of the CPU the whole time, it recovered NOTHING. It appears to be non-functional software.
Hi @fishpoem I have split your post/question out from that 7-year old thread.
Recuva works fine here - with the caveat that any attempted file recovery depends firstly on what type of drive you are attempting to recover from.
I suspect that that you are attempting recovery from a SSD drive that has TRIM’med/garbage collected before your attempted recovery.
Recovery from a SSD that has been TRIM’med/garbage collected is not usually possible, SSD’s work very differently to spinning disk HDD’s, USB sticks, and SD cards.
You can think of TRIM and Garbage Collection on a SSD as being equivalent to a “Secure Delete and/or Wipe Free Space” on other types of drive.
The difference being that it happens automatically with SSD’s. (Most of them anyway).
ie. it isn’t Recuva that has changed it’s the way that SSD’s work differently to other, older, types of drive.
I have never recovered anything useful from a SSD that has been TRIM’med/garbage collected, I have and still can use Recuva to recover deleted files from the other types of drive.
Otherwise you may have the filters or other settings in Recuva not set quite as you want them
If you would firstly like to confirm what type of media you are attempting recovery from.
And then if it isn’t an SSD what data/why you are trying to recover, with screeenshots of the Recuva setting you are using if possible, then we may be able to see what is happening and give further advice.
PS What version of Windows are you using, and do you have a secure delete utility running?
Hey, thanks for taking the time and trouble to dig into this. I didn’t expect such a thorough follow-up. It’s a Win10 Pro OS with tons of memory and a Western Digital WD10EZEX-00WN4A0 - 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hard Drive HDD**.** Weirdly, Recuva has worked just fine many times in the past. But I had to re-install Win10 recently, and a couple other applications have misbehaved since. Plus it’s an old PC, so who knows. Thanks.
That does seem odd, are you using the recovery wizard or the advanced options?
Any other details you can give, such as what file types you are looking for, is it an internal or external HDD, etc. may help work out what may be happening.
I was trying trying to recover a couple of Excel files, *.xlsx. That’s it. Then again, Recuva doesn’t permit that surgical of a search. It just collects everything, then I have to search to find it. But like I said, in this case there was nothing to search.
Are there still .bak versions of the xlsx files, one gets created when you update/resave the spreadsheet, or did you delete those too?
If they are still there then just change .bak to .xlsx to get the previous version back.
PS. You should be able to specify file types to search for in the Advanced options.
Nope. I looked everywhere, using various search strings. Gone. Windows File Recovery didn’t find anything either. Carbonite proved useless as well. All the copies it saved were already mangled. This is the very kind of vexsome mystery that causes somebody like me to spend hours trying to understand it. So I bought EaseUs Lifetime for $79 (with a coupon.) I figure if f a problem like this happens once, it will happen again. I run it tonight and see what happens.