Recuva recovers the wrong content

[Willy2]

First, let me state that I used the program yesterday for the first time in say 4 or 5 years.

I needed to recover a number of files I accidently deleted. I was able to succesfully recover those files.

After that I started fiddling with the program. Tried to recover a number of other files that supposedly were not overwritten by other files. But when I tried to play those files (these were *.mp4 & *.flv files) it turned out out that the content of the files was different from what the title was promising. And some files, that were supposedly "recoverable" generated an error. (e.g. "General Error") And this happened with all 3 mediaplayers I have installed (and regularly use).

When the program was recovering those files, it copied/recoverd those files from the D drive (external) drive and put those files onto my main drive (C). 

That's where the prgram code needs to be improved in a future version. Perhaps other programs are "interfering" with RECUVA ?? Perhaps the program needs to better "protect its internal variables" ?

[Augeas]

Recuva recovers the right contents, but not necessarily in the right order (perhaps you need to be old, and English, for that one).

You've been around for too long for me to give you a lecture Willy, but this is too good an opportunity to miss.

Recuva looks at, and displays, the meta data from the MFT during a normal scan. When Recuva recovers a file it follows the data cluster addresses in the MFT and copies whatever is there faithfully. There is no way that Recuva can verify that the data matches the file type, or whether it should, or whether it's what you are looking for. Recuva recovers the data, what you make of it is up to you.

Recovery is a copy operation. Most files can be 'recovered' in this way, even those that have been overwritten. A request for a recovery is a request to copy clusters, and then we're back to the previous paragraph.

[nukecad]

3 hours ago, Augeas said:

the right contents, but not necessarily in the right order (perhaps you need to be old, and English, for that one).

That's easy sunbeam - Andre Preview.

There again I am English, and getting older.

[Willy2]

- To be honest: this is the first time I used the program for "recovering" a (fairly large) bunch of (large) files.

- Luckily those files were on an non-system drive. I use that drive to backup all the files I have on my main (system) drive.And I was keenly aware that writing to that disk would risk overwriting those files that needed to be recovered. So, I didn't write/copy any files to that drive before "recovering" those "lost" files. And that's - of course - the best way to approach this "recovery" problem.

- Yes, after giving it some hours of thought, I figured out what the limitations are of "recovering" those files with RECUVA.