I’m using free version of recuva, the first time none of my recovered photo would open even though both were JPG, so I deleted them again with Webroot, decided to try and recover the photos again, so now its done 4 of 9 scans, equaling thousands of photos, NO way did I delete that many, now it doing a 5th scan that it says will take over 24 hours, the first scan was only an hour, so what is going on here? it’s been scanning for 5 hours now. I only had like 200 photos. why is this scan taking 24 hours? And why can’t I include a photo on here?
The first question has to be -What size is the drive?
With todays TB sized drives a scan can take a long time.
Then what kind of scan are you doing?
Using the Wizard or the Advanced options?
Doing a Standard scan or a Deep scan?
Searching ‘everywhere’ for ‘everything’ that has ever been deleted?
Scanning for files or scanning for contents?
How old is the drive?
You would be amazed just how many files get deleted from a drive over the years, particularly if it is used for backups where files are replaced every backup.
PS. New users are not allowed to post images or weblinks, it’s an automatic anti-spam measure that you will find on many/most fora.
I have tweaked your user settings so you should be able to post images now.
PPS. Do you actually believe the ‘time remaining’ estimated by any software? (I don’t because it often wrong and often by a wide margin).
Just tried it again, tweaked the search for photos only. None of the photos I deleted showed up that I wanted to recover, got a bunch of files that couldn’t be opened. pics of flags and other junk like stuff I viewed on face Book,. some were shown as icons and when I clicked to open it, got" looks like we don’t support this Format". It included some photos never saved. This Recuva is not doing what it is supposed to do.
Recuva is doing what it is supposed to do, it is finding files that have at sometime been on the drive and have then been deleted.
However what it is supposed to do may not be what you thought it did.
Or what you thought you had told it to do.
Images do get automatically downloaded onto your drive by things like Facebook, and Amazon, and may other places, and then they get deleted again when you leave.
Your browsers may also save files and images from webpages onto your drive, particularly if you have the browser set to pre-load or pre-fetch web pages.
You might not know that any of that was going on all the time in the background, but Recuva finds the file(s) because it was there and then it was deleted.
Rather than searching for ‘images’ try using Advanced Mode and searching for the specific image filetype that you want to find eg. search for *.jpg and/or *.jpeg, and/or *.img etc.
Drop the arrow next to ‘Filename or Path’ select ‘Pictures’; then click the word ‘Pictures’; you will be given a list of common image filetypes, you can remove any that you don’t want Recuva to search for:
Note that rather that doing it that way you can just type in the filetypes you want to search for separated by a pipe (vertical bar).
For example entering:
*.jpg| *.jpeg| *.img| *.png
would search for deleted image files of those 4 filetypes only.
See this for more about using Recuva’s Advanced Mode: