Well, that's not really a representative test. Files that are created and then deleted quite often have their MFT entry and data overwritten immediately, what with the numerous background tasks Windows is performing for you. Also files deleted to the recycler are renamed by Windows, so you would not necessarily find them under their original names.
I second to this @Clean Me Please. I have been using CCleaner for like ages now. I am a member of yahoo answers and have recommended a lot of people to try recuva without testing it properly...
I tested it today to see that it really does not find the file specially under the my documents or downloads
for example : C:\users\abcd\downloads
If i delete a file here and also from recycle bin. Recuva should find it when i am giving the path to this folder and askin it to find it. The results ends up into nothing or no files found, it should find something with a changed name or something
To add to this i did a search in C and it was not able to find this folder downloads, is this some mapped folder in Win 7
Am i searcing in the wrong place.
If you see in my screenshot, under users it only find the APP DATA
PS: There isnt any way to give search path manually i think that should be added
cool tool but could not recover my HDD camcorder from an accidental format. i was really disappointed in this product, as i had high hopes of it working as well as your other products. The tool also had issues recovering RAW images from photoshop just recently deleted in recycle bin. another negative is even with going into advanced settings its really difficult to recover off the wall formats like files from gimp, etc. sorry guys but this tool really needs work. and yes i am keeping in mind that it is FREE.
I don't think there's any problem with the way Recuva works in terms of recovering files I think all programs use the same method it's finding the start of the lost cluster that's the key.
The problem is files that get deleted are not always recoverable because they could be instantly overwritten by another file or the cluster information for the file gets damaged making them appear to be overwritten.
I made the mistake of deleting an mp3 file on a non-OS drive and before I did anything else I fired up Recuva to recover it.
Unfortunately the file had part of the clusters allocated to another mp3 file which I thought was slightly odd considering it was at least 3 years old and had never been touched.
So I tried 2 other recovery programs and again the same problem the file was damaged and unrecoverable just as Recuva had already indicated.