I Don't Understand the Files Recuva "Recovers"

[Jiffie]

Hello,

 

I'm super, super new at this, I'm not really good at computers, but I'm trying to learn all I can and I'm pretty good at DIY stuff, however, this is troubling me. Here's the thing, I had a massive flash drive filled with a lot of information (I have also backed up one of my computers fully on it with room to spare). I accidentally overwritten everything on it with the media creation tool kit to install windows 10 (I have a broken computer than needs restarting back to factory, and, like an idiot, I used an important flash drive to do this on without backing it up). I've Googled all I can about my situation, and though I can only find complaints of people saying they want to "permanently" erase their files, I'm actually on the other side of the argument in wanting to recover these "not really deleted" files, but I'm not getting many hits in my search because looking for how to recover overwritten files keeps giving me "you have a permanent thumbprint in your various tech" results. Anyways, through viewing sites talking about how files aren't ever really deleted, I've been redirected to Recuva, the first of another file recovery program I've tried so far.

 

Recuva actually gives me the best results, out of another program I had used, as when I do a file recovery on the flash drive, it brings up thousands (really, a whole lot, I don't even know the number) of files, so I think it's working and doing its job. The problem is, all of these files have strange names with weird characters or numbers, and they look nothing like my labeled files I had deleted/overwritten from my flash drive. I really feel as if these are my missing files, but they are all "white paper" icons that I don't have the program to open, and just massive amounts of folders I don't understand.

 

I'm trying to be optimistic, as I really think these are my files, as the space it takes up makes sense, however, I just can't read them, and don't know what to do with them to bring them back to life. I've tried searching and Googling everywhere about this, but all results I find either present this recovery thing as so simple and easy to understand, as if everyone can just look at these files with the complicated extensions and know what to do, or if maybe they are all getting better results than I am, and are actually getting files with correct names and formatting. I've also read a few things of people saying their files have been corrupted (they don't go into detail, so I don't know if their situation resembles mine), but I neither gotten a message telling me so, so I don't believe this to be my case. I also used another program (I won't list the name of it, as I'm not sure if it's considered advertising or not), and though this program gave me less files, it did the exact same thing Recuva did and gave me a folder filled with oddly named, "missing program" files that I don't know how to open.

 

What I'm asking is, what are these various folders filled with weirdly labeled files? Do I need a program to read them? Am I supposed to take another step after I recover with Recuva? Did I recover my stuff wrong? Is it something I'm missing or is this what corrupted files look like? (I'm really hoping the last one isn't the case, as Recuva have given me the green light of OK on these files, and I haven't received any sort of messages about problems in the recovery).

 

Please help!

[Augeas]

There’s a lot here. Firstly don’t be taken in by comments that files are not really deleted. It might be true at the moment of deletion, but the space occupied by those files is immediately available for reuse by new files, and it very frequently is.

 

1) What file system is the flash drive, NTFS or FAT32? If you don’t know then just right click against the drive letter in Explorer and select Properties. The file system is listed near the top.

 

2) Did you run a normal scan or deep scan?

 

3) Are the weird file names just random letters or something like [000123].jpg?

 

4) How did you accidentally overwrite your data? Under Windows you have to delete files first.

 

The prognosis when overwriting files, especially with something like an O/S install package, is not good. You may have found a lot of deleted files, but it doesn’t look as if they are the files you want. There are no further steps to recovery, Recuva is merely recovering what is on the drive.

[Jiffie]

I'm sorry for the late response, I'm having computer trouble, and was without one for a long while. I'm really sorry.

 

1) The flash drive is a FAT32.

 

2) I ran a deep scan.

 

3) It is both, a few at the top are random letters and symbols, while I do have some folders that are like [000003] etc. I see some photos and other unknown files that are named the same. Inside these folders with the numbers like [000004] are unknown files named things like _1_e9b6a6af4677e0812a2dd256af1729c4 as example of the first file (I tried checking to see what type of file this is, but properties just shows "file").

 

4) I was trying to upgrade another computer with the Windows 10 installation set up (I believe it's called windows media kit, or something), and I used an important flash drive that I forgot to backup; I remembered a How-to website warning me that this process deletes the files on the flashdrive (the actual installation didn't even prompt and notify me of this), but this realization came after I had installed the setup...

 

I understand if my files are lost, and I'm prepared for that outcome, however, in the bulk of files I recovered using Recuva, I see that it had managed to restore a lot of old photo files I had long since deleted from said flashdrive many years and usage ago (these photos are all randomly named in the [0000072] etc. set up); I know the flash drive is sort of random on what files it overwrite/delete/save and such, but seeing that these files exist give me hope that my files are in there, I'm just missing a program needed to open it.

 

A lot of files that I can't open (I found a lot of family photos that have been recovered, along with random images I know were saved to the flashdrive, and I am able to open them) ends in .man, Prc, and .dll(though I know these .dll files to be some sort of hardware files? I don't know, but I know that's not any of the files I'm looking for) along with a few others that just doesn't seem like anything I want to bother with. I have had several folders filled with miscellaneous things on this flashdrive, one was filled with family photos, another filled with my brother's personal files, and another was a backup of my PC (images, word/notepad, bookmarks, etc.); I seem to have recovered a lot of image and music files that I can open normally, but they are mostly of my family photo folder, and my brother's music/images, but I can't find my folder that had most of my images and word documents.

 

At least, I think I can't, because I am scanning through all of the images, and most of them I know is from a section that was backed up from my family member's cellphone (they had transferred their stuff onto my flashdrive); the only thing I can find that's probably related to my personal folder is these images of icons that have possibly been saved to my "bookmark" section in my files; I never saved these photos personally, but I think they are something my Firefox had saved automatically when I viewed it (because I have seen these images before, I just never saved them to anything... it's confusing to me why they are here), and just came with the file backup when I backed up my computer onto the flashdrive. I don't really understand it well enough to explain it, but these images are the only thing I know that relates to what I'm looking for.

 

I'm digressing, I just want to say that a lot of images transferred, but that's probably only 20 percent of what Recuva had recovered, possibly 20 of what was deleted from my flashdrive, and the only thing I can open on a family computer; there's so much more files Recuva had brought out, but none of the names are right, and they are files I don't know how to open.