Recuva says it will take 24 days

[escotz]

My daughter was having trouble with her computer so she took it to the IT guy at her college. He re-set the computer to its origional settings and she lost all files and programs. She installed Recuva on an external drive and set it to deep scan to recover everything. Revuca has been running for 3 days and it says it's 3% complete (found over 11 thousand files so far), and estimated time to completion is 24 days. Is something wrong? Should she stop the program and recover some of it now, then restart the program? Any other suggestions?

[Nergal]

Depending on the size of her drive deep scan can take a long time (read days) 24 is the program's estimation and should shrink (might grow). HOWEVER she should (instead) remove her drive (have the it guy do this if she wants) and mount it on a different computer then run recuva. this will cause the least amount of writes to the drive, the more writes the less likely recovery can occur.

[escotz]

Depending on the size of her drive deep scan can take a long time (read days) 24 is the program's estimation and should shrink (might grow). HOWEVER she should (instead) remove her drive (have the it guy do this if she wants) and mount it on a different computer then run recuva. this will cause the least amount of writes to the drive, the more writes the less likely recovery can occur.

 

What will happen if she stops Recuva and recovers some of the files to the external drive, then re-starts Recuva? Also, Recuva was installed on the external drive and is looking at her main drive for files to recover - so why would there be any re-writes on the main drive that might impeed file recovery?

[Nergal]

What will happen if she stops Recuva and recovers some of the files to the external drive, then re-starts Recuva?

Recuva is making a copy of the files recovered so stopping it would, essentially restart the "24 days" as if they had never been started in the first place

Also, Recuva was installed on the external drive and is looking at her main drive for files to recover - so why would there be any re-writes on the main drive that might impeed file recovery?

if the main drive is running a live operating system, even if no programs are opened/run during the process, the Operating system is still doing it's business (writing logs, checking for updates, opening screensavers etc.) While most of these writes probably won't overwrite anything during the course of a non-deepscan, my worry would be over the length of days something might get overwritten (better-safe-than-sorry approach). As she is at college, I'm sure someone in a next-door dormroom has a computer she can slave her drive to.

However, this isn't as urgent a thing as maybe I made it seem in my first post, but again better-safe-than-sorry.

[escotz]

Recuva is making a copy of the files recovered so stopping it would, essentially restart the "24 days" as if they had never been started in the first place

 

if the main drive is running a live operating system, even if no programs are opened/run during the process, the Operating system is still doing it's business (writing logs, checking for updates, opening screensavers etc.) While most of these writes probably won't overwrite anything during the course of a non-deepscan, my worry would be over the length of days something might get overwritten (better-safe-than-sorry approach). As she is at college, I'm sure someone in a next-door dormroom has a computer she can slave her drive to.

However, this isn't as urgent a thing as maybe I made it seem in my first post, but again better-safe-than-sorry.

 

Yes, the main drive is running a live operating system so I understand what you're saying. I searched blogs and found that it's not uncommon for Recuva to hang up before it finishes. That is why I keep asking about a partial recovery and resumption. It would be awful if she let the program run for weeks and then lost everything it found and had to start again.

[Augeas]

The option to recover files from a formatted (or otherwise 're-set') drive is Scan for Non-Deleted Files, not Deep Scan. This will run in a very much shorter time. I would recommend that you try this first. However if the college guy deleted all her files before the 're-set', which I would think is unlikely, then Deep Scan is your only option.

[escotz]

The option to recover files from a formatted (or otherwise 're-set') drive is Scan for Non-Deleted Files, not Deep Scan. This will run in a very much shorter time. I would recommend that you try this first. However if the college guy deleted all her files before the 're-set', which I would think is unlikely, then Deep Scan is your only option.

I am certain the IT guy did not delete her files or uninstall the programs, but I don't know exactly what he did. I know he restarted the computer in safe mode and did something from there to fix the boot problem. I just called my daughter, Recuva was started 4 days ago and it now estimates 48 days to completion, so unless I hear serious objections from someone, I'm going to ask her to take your advice.