Do revovered files need extra space from hard disk?

[Franssales]

Starting a very big recovering job. Two disk, which have been almost full of data must be recovered.

 

So my question is: will recovered files be recovered to the space which they take right now, unrecovered? Or must I try to recover them to another disk, to avoid the possibility that the recovered files are written over the files that has not been recovered yet?

[Augeas]

will recovered files be recovered to the space which they take right now, unrecovered? Or must I try to recover them to another disk, to avoid the possibility that the recovered files are written over the files that has not been recovered yet?

Files are recovered to the first available free space on the disk, not (necessarily) to the space they previously occupied. If you have a lot of files to recover, or if the files are important, then you should recover to a separate device, as indeed Recuva advises.

 

I'm curious why you should want to recover two disks-worth of files. Recuva is intended to recover deleted files, have you really deleted two disks-worth of files? To delete one disk may be regarded as a misfortune: to delete both looks like carelessness, as Oscar didn't quite say.

 

You should reduce, or end absolutely, any activity on the two disks whatsoever. You should not be booting up your pc from these disks (to avoid overwriting any files). Recuva should be installed on a separate disk. All files being recovered should be to a separate device, an alternative disk or flash drive. Good luck.