Size of files has swollen greatly - unmanageable

[majortom]

Something seems to have gone wrong somehow.

I used Recuva to recover data from a crashed hard drive and it managed a creditable 79GB which is about all that was on there.

I then went through the second phase of converting the recovered data and was surprised a how slow it was - projecting 8 days to finish! Then I realised that the file size had mushroomed to an extraordinary 1812GB which will demolish my 2TB hard drive.

There must be a lot of padding or duplication that can be trimmed out, but it will surely be very tedious. I do not know if the hard drive will take it even though it is nearly empty. This is crazy!

Any advice please?

[Augeas]

I think we need a more detailed description of what you are doing. What do you mean by 'converting the recovered data'? There's no conversion stage with Recuva.