Recuva give back unopenable (or useless) files?

[Idleguy]

Hi, I've used and waited Recuva recover my deleted files from my formatted external hard drive for 15 hours. But in the end, I can not be happy for long while all recovered files are unopenable (or useless). Can someone tell me what I can do next please?  Thanks for reading.

[Nergal]

Sadly no recovery program can promise the definite full recovery of previously deleted files. This is true for the free softwares (such as Recuva) and this is true for $500/hour cleanroom recovery.From Wikipedia article on Data Recovery

 

Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and the space they occupy is made available for later overwriting. For the end users, deleted files are not discoverable through a standard file manager, but that data still technically exists on the drive. In the meantime, the original file contents remain, often in a number of disconnected fragments, and may be recoverable.

So while recuva might mark something "excellent" this may only indicate that the majority of fragments seem to be in a whole state. Excellent does not means the same as definite.True Example: I reformatted over 40 GB of mp3s on a 200GB hard drive. I immediately ran both Recuva and a competitive software I was able to recover about 1/5 of the data as "excellent" or its equivalent. Between the two softwares (non-concurrent) runs, the scan and recovery took roughly 72 hours. Sadly however about 3/4 of the recovered songs were either too broken to even open or were partial or multiple songs crushed together. However I was successful in regaining a few (1/20th) of my lost I'd say the programs did their jobs.Much of the time a file can be reconstructed (carved https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_carving ) but even this does not always guarantee recovery...nothing can guarantee it.