I've been researching what this means I am not tech savvy, so I really don't understand most of the explanations I have found for what it means when files are unrecoverable, overwritten and how to solve that problem. If you could make this as simple and straight forward as possible, that would be hugely helpful.
Basically, I'm a youtuber, and I typically delete old videos I don't need anymore to save hard drive space. So I did what I normally do, but selected all of my game recording videos, didn't realize I had, and sent over 300 videos into my recycle bin. When I opened my recycle bin, the videos I had wanted to delete for good were in there, but the others were not. Those other videos, the ones I actually need, have yet to appear into my recycle bin.
So I downloaded Recuva, and it is recovering over 90 files right now. But there are several of my more recent videos that it says are unrecoverable, and that they have been overwritten by the drive that they came from.
I did delete the videos I knew I didn't want from my recycle bin, but I know for a fact I did not delete anything else. I have no idea why I can't see these files in my recycle bin. I have Recuva scanning my recycle bin for deleted files, also. Maybe I'll get lucky!
As far as Recuva is concerned, a state of Poor means that some data clusters allocated to the file have been overwritten by another file, Very Poor means that the majority of data clusters have been overwritten, and unrecoverable mans that all data clusters have been overwritten (or that the file length is zero).
Overwritten simply means that since the file was deleted some or all of the data clusters previously allocated to it have been allocated to another file. That file itself may have subsequently been deleted, but Recuva can't tell that.
All data clusters can be recovered, in that they can be copied to another place on disk. However if Recuva doesn't say that they are excellent then they are unlikely to be in a usable form. Even files marked as Excellent may have had some of their data clusters used by a newer file and then freed again, making the file unusable.
There's no fix to overwritten and unrecoverable.
As far as the Recycle Bin side of it goes, my guess is since you had 300'ish videos, they all probably couldn't fit and never went there, instead getting permanently deleted.
Hopefully when you did the fatal delete of the videos, Windows would have prompted you along the lines "The files you want to delete are too big to fit in the Recycle Bin and will be deleted; Are you sure?"
That's the bizarre thing, because most of the files I recovered last night were ones I recorded a while back, and were fairly large. Most files that were never recovered, or partially recovered, were smaller files, basically videos no more than a a few minutes long. I never got a notification that the files were too big, my computer said it sent all of them to the recycle bin. Lovely.
I had all of the video files I needed, organized into projects on Windows Movie Maker before I deleted them. Could it be that having them in movie maker is what is causing them to be overwritten? If I remove the projects, can I successfully recover them?
No, they are overwritten because windows needed to use the freespace created when they were deleted, no more mystery than that; no causes like which program made them or anything else makes yhis occur