Recovered files larger than original size?

[DanMumford]

Hello,

Unfortunately I have had an issue with the external hard drive I use to store all my DSLR photos ( and some other things)

It seems that most of the files are still on the drive, except for the folder (and subfolders) named 'My Photography'...it has completely disappeared!

I have used Recuva on the drive and selected some of the other options (deep scan, restore file structure etc) and it has found a lot of the files, however the drive is 1TB(showing as 931gb) but it's saying I need 1,863gb to recover the files, and unfortunately my second drive is also only 1TB.

 

How can the recovered files be almost twice the size of the original files?

 

Thanks!

[spaceranger]

I spent 15 minutes setting up an account - what is the answer to this obviously common question

[nukecad]

Recuva is finding the original filesize of the deleted files, so that it can estimate how much space is needed to try and recover them to.

If the disc-space originally taken by a now deleted file has then been overwritten (or partially overwritten) with another file, and then that newer one deleted too, Recuva finds the original filesizes for both deleted files and calculates how much space it needs to recover both.

Which means that in certain instances it can be counting the same space twice.
And so that can add up to more than the actual disc size.

Obviously you won't be able to recover the older file, it's been overwritten.
But Recuva doesn't know that until it actually tries the recovery, it's just reading how big the original files were.

If you find yourself with that situation you could cut down what Recuva is searching for so that it finds less, which will fit on your 'recover-to' disc.
Then do it again searching for different things, and do the recovery in stages like that.

[Augeas]

Nukecad talks sense, although a cavil would be that regarding 'Recuva doesn't know that until it actually tries the recovery', Recuva does't know anything at all, and just recovers whatever clusters are addressed by the deleted files' metadata (not that Recuva can 'know' anything at all). So some recovered data is duplicated.

Of course we don't know what the O/P is trying to recover. In some cases everything is checked, including Scan for Non Deleted Files, and everything is selected for recovery. This includes system files, some of which are sparse files and have a nominal size of the entire partition, so the space requirements for recovery will exceed the original partition, or drive, by a considerable amount.