Now this is cool

[mgpw4me]

Recently I deleted 1,000 (yes, 1000 video) files from my usb hard drive.  I tried other software that said I needed to run as ADMIN, so I did, and it made no difference.  Some programs had limitations on the size of the recovery, but the files recovered (as a test) were unusable.

 

OK, I'm a dumb**s for deleting all those files, but guess what, someone knew I would !!!  Kewl.

 

The only issue I have is that the directory the files were in isn't created for me.  Don't really care...at the moment even the files marked as overwritten are coming up roses.  1000 files X 1gb is how long on the internet?

 

For those who care, I was using a USB hard drive and wanted to permanently delete a single file.  Between Windows and my fingers, the decision was made to delete way more.

 

Anyway, about 200 files in and EVERY FILE is being recovered.  Great program.

[hazelnut]

Glad to hear of your success with the recovery mgpw4me.

 

We all make these ''little errors'' from time to time

[Andavari]

I'm glad my 2TB USB Hard Disk has a working Recycle Bin!

 

Based upon this topic    I'm going to now maximize the Recycle Bin available space should I accidentally delete my music collection or hard disk image files.

[mgpw4me]

Final summary.

 

On an external 4tb usb drive, with no writes to the disk after files were deleted:

 

Recova found 958 of 1042 files.  544 files were partially recovered. 15 files could not be recovered.  No files over 4gb in size were recovered.  With no list of partially recovered files to check against, and no ability to recover the large files, deep scan was ineffective.

 

I have lots of files to check for corruption, but everything I've looked at, has worked so far.

 

The hunt goes on for a recovery tool that can handle the large files and find the missing files.

[Augeas]

NTFS zeroes the cluster addresses when it deletes files larger than 4gb, so a normal scan will find the file name but have some sort of message that the data can't be found on the disk. In theory the data can be found with a deep scan, as it still is on the disk (assuming it hasn't been overwritten), but as such large files are very likely to be fragmented then recovery is limited to the first fragment, which probably isn't a lot of use. Data recovery specialists, and even some recovery software, can try to patch fragmented files together by making assumptions, but it is a bit hit and miss.

[mgpw4me]

Thanks.  I ran the deep scan while I verified the recovered files.  Seems deep scan doesn't like MKV files.  It did actually find the one avi, but couldn't recover it.

 

The drive is a dedicated (manual) backup, so I'm sure nothing has been overwritten.

 

Anyway, I have all but 24 files back and working 100% (out of 1,042) so I'm a pretty happy camper.  Turns out the count of files recovered didn't match up with what I ended up with (somehow I got more recovered than the summary indicated).

 

I'm trying another program that has found the big files (and has a file-based defragger), but it will be a few hours (7% in 24 minutes) before I know if they can be recovered.  If so, the defragger may corrupt some of the remaining 'missing' files...so be it.  If it doesn't work, I'll just reload what I have and go from there.

 

** note to self ** drink rum OR use shift + delete, but don't do both

[mgpw4me]

Final result.  24 files cannot be recovered.  Time to pick up the pieces.

 

Thanks to all.

[hazelnut]

Keep in touch !!