Protect areas of drive required for file revovery

[Alfpham4le]

Hello Recuva - newbie question / request ...

I Used Shift Delete on a large area of My 4TB hard drive and immediately fired up Recuva. I want to recover the approx. 3TB of "Excellent" status files rather than sort and select (this will take a long time).

There is about 500GB free space on the drive, so I am hoping that during recovery the program will ...

1. Use truly free / blank space, recognise drive areas used by files yet to be recovered, and then

2. Reclaim the additional space needed by overwriting areas used by files from the list that have already been recovered.

Is this how Recuva works, or will the process turn Excellent files into Unrecoverable scraps?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Augeas]

That isn't how Recuva, or recovery software in general, works. Recuva will copy files it is recovering to a separate drive, so you will need an additional 3tb+ drive to hold the recovered files. In Advanced Mode go to Options/Actions and at the bottom of the pane check Restore Folder Structure. Then run your recovery.

Although Recuva can handle the massive disks that some use today it's very difficult for a human to handle the millions of files involved. Beyond backup, beyond recovery.

[Alfpham4le]

OK - thanks for your quick response.

Of course this is not the answer I was hoping for! I am at a remote location and do not have a spare 4TB drive sitting on my desk. I do, however, have more than sufficient space on my existing drive to hold a fully restored set of files, once the unneeded space taken up by deleted files has been released. A smart process of progressively restoring the files would be the ultimate Recovery tool. Isn't this how Defragmentation works?

[Augeas]

Sort of, but with live files, and NTFS knows exactly where they are. NTFS doesn't care a bit about deleted files, and I can see no way of performing a recovery to the source disk: the mechanics of it are horrendous. (Well, I occasionally run a single file recovery to the source disk, but that's another matter.) It won't happen without a new file system, and I can't see anyone spending millions to enable this.