There are deleted files on a USB drive that I want to undelete. Recuva finds them, but the only option I can find is to copy the files to a new location (on another drive.) Back in the old days, we could say "undelete" and the file magically reappears on the same drive. Since undeleting a file only involves changing the deleted file indicator in the header (E5?), changing that indicator should be a totally non-destructive process. Will Recuva (or another utility) undelete files in place, or am I missing something?
Deleting a file involves far more than setting a flag in the MFT, and in some instances is a destructive process. The changes made in the delete process also allow any part of the file allocation to be reused, so an undelete isn't really an option even in theory, and I'm not sure it has been for the last 20 years.
There's no undelete function in Recuva, but you can restore a file to the same device at your own risk. It is of course safer to restore to another device then copy the files back to the drive.
Thanks for the information. I'm going to buy a new hard drive and copy everything over to it.
My long term memory has kicked in.
In the old days under DOS 3.2? when a file was deleted the first character of the filename was cancelled from the Directory Table,
and sectors used were linked to the Free Space chain.
You could UNdelete and if you were lucky you could spot what you needed in a list of files with blank first letters and you could add the desired letter.
This was built into later versions of DOS, see
http://www.computerhope.com/undelete.htm
FAT chance on NTFS ! ! !