wrong file recovered

[torrtruk]

hi all. First of all, I'd like to thank the entire recuva team for developing this free tool. It's really cool and thin.

 

One issue I've seen is when I try to recover a file(usually an audio or a video), sometimes it recovers me a different file. I tried doing this again, but still the same. Hope you understand the scenario.

[Augeas]

It's possible the space the deleted file originally occupied has been overwritten with another file, but the deleted file's entry in the MFT (which is what Recuva looks at) still exists, and still points to the original space. Recuva will recover whatever is in that space, so you get another file returned. It's also possible that the overwriting file has been deleted too, so you could recover an entirely different deleted file. (It's not very easy to express this in a foolproof lucid manner.)

[torrtruk]

It's possible the space the deleted file originally occupied has been overwritten with another file, but the deleted file's entry in the MFT (which is what Recuva looks at) still exists.

 

Is it possible for recuva to maintain its own MFT kind of table which contains only the list of recoverable files? Because there's actually no use in recovering a different file eventhough Recuva is able to get a file that had overwritten the original one?

[Augeas]

I shouldn't have thought so: nor would it be, in my opinion, even in the slightest bit desirable. If Recuva sometimes recovers data that is of no use then that's just part of the process of recovering deleted data. In any event Recuva only produces a snapshot of the state of your pc, there's usually some other activity going off, either user or system, that's creating and deleting files as you stare at the screen.