Options needed for recovery of large number of files

[Atlantic]

Greetings, all.  I have a client whose system was unable to boot; I fixed the problem with a reinstallation of the operating system, but (of course) the client had no backup at all and lost his data.

I then ran Recuva on his system in Deep Scan mode.  From my notes, 63 hours later, we had discovered 8.2 million files, many of which are fully enumerated and seem to have extent file/folder structure (though it is difficult to confirm this because of the size of the data; even scrolling down to check on the files causing Recuva to delay several minutes in displaying any results), which check in at almost exactly 5 TB of data in total.  I had an external drive prepared to receive this, but it has only 4 TB available; I am aware, however, that some files may not be recoverable and therefore the amount of data claimed may not correspond with the final amount of space it will take up.

As it happens, the client works extensively with images, along with some video and audio data; he doesn't really care about anything else as his system is now working.

My options, in order of preference, would seem to be:

1. Identify all images, video, and audio data in the Deep Scan results, and back them (and them only) up to the existing external backup drive, avoiding the space problems.  (I don't know, in examining the documentation, whether or not this is possible without re-running the scan, which I would obviously like to avoid.)
2. Purchase a large drive, either a physical device or some sort of large cloud storage allotment, and back up everything to there - then sift through everything and return the wanted files to the original drive.  (This would have the advantage of giving the client a needed backup device afterwards.)
3. Restore everything back to the original drive - which would likely overwrite some needed data.  I'd prefer to avoid this option.

First question: is the first option possible?  The second would be, is there anything I'm missing here?

Thanks very much in advance for any assistance you can provide.

[Guest johnccleaner]

If you're not already using this, I would recommend getting in touch with our friendly Sales team about Recuva Technician Edition by sending an email to sales@ccleaner.com - keep in mind that our Free and Professional versions are licensed only for home, personal use.  We also offer Technician Editions of our other desktop products (CCleaner, Defraggler, and Speccy.)

In any event, I would definitely agree that option 3 is not suitable; if it was one or two files totaling a couple of KB, it would probably be okay, but what you're describing would almost certainly lead to some, or even significant portions, of the data you're trying to recover being overwritten by data recovered earlier in the process - I don't think you, I, or your client would want that.

Please take a look at our documentation here: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045234532#file-name--0-7 - if you're not already using Advanced Mode, you can click the 'Switch to Advanced Mode' button in the top-right corner of the window to access it. You'd need to know what types of file are desired (say, .jpg, .gif, and .png files as an example) but that would allow you to filter the scan results by file type, which should reduce the number of files considerably. 

You can furthermore then click the 'Condition' header at the top of the list to sort by Condition, allowing you to filter to just the 'Excellent' condition files, for instance. Feel free to use shift-click or ctrl-click to select multiple files. That should again help reduce how much space is required, though it is possible that files not listed as 'Excellent' condition may still be recoverable or at least able to be repaired after recovery.

[Atlantic]

John,

Thank you for the response - and yes, I'm very interested in speaking to your sales department concerning professional or Technician versions of your software.  I'll send them an email as soon as I can.

To clarify: in using Advance Mode to designate file types, would that mean a re-run of the scan in Deep Mode?  As noted, my earlier scan took 63 hours, and I'm not sure the client would want to go through that again.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Atlantic
added phrase for clarity

[Guest johnccleaner]

I believe that the 'Scan for non-deleted files' parameter would require a Deep Scan; enabling Deep Scan from that menu would, likewise, necessitate a new scan to have an effect.

Otherwise, the others just affect filtering options and so wouldn't require a new scan. And, of course, make sure that the types of files you're to recover would match the Deep Scan functionality anyway - otherwise, you would want to rescan with Deep Scan disabled (thankfully, this should take much less time) so that it could find other types of files as well.