Recover Deleted Documents folder in User Profile on Remote Desktop Server

[yimpy]

Slightly unusual situation i need help with.  I am running an RDS server as a virtual server it's working fine.  So the drive is a VHD file rather than a physical drive.

We have a group policy that we accidentally applied to the server which cleans up "user profiles" after x days.

When the user logged in after a month they got a new profile as expected (as old one deleted) and new but very EMPTY documents folder.  Huge problem for us.

When I run Recuva on the VHD attached to the host or directly logged in to the server I cannot see much of the users profile to recover.  Mainly C:\USERS\%username%\appdata.

There are a number of .SQL, .CSPROJ, .VBPROJ or .SLN files that are critical.

The server itself doesn't have a huge amount of activity, only a few users and almost all data is stored elsewhere so not much being written back to the drive.

I work for a UK charity and this lost data is critical. 

We are usually very careful with our backups but this server was never supposed to have data written to it.  

[Guest johnccleaner]

To begin with, can you let me know if you used the Deep Scan or not? In this case, I would not recommend using the Deep Scan - as indicated in the article located here: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204044074 it would not be relevant for the types of files that you're looking for.

You can also check each of the items (other than Deep Scan) in the Scanning section of the Actions tab of the Options Menu, as demonstrated in the screenshot attached to that image, this will prevent Recuva from filtering any of the detected items - it is unlikely that the files you're looking for are being filtered by any of those rules, but it's prudent to check this anyway, just to be on the safe side. 

With these options taken into account, if Recuva is not detecting the files, then unfortunately the software will not be able to recover these files; at that point, I would recommend looking into the services of a data recovery company as their technicians would be more likely to be able to recover this data. I would, however, recommend also letting them know the specifics of the situation, as being that this is a .VHD, that might complicate matters for them further. 

Optimally, the simplest solution would be to restore the files from backups, but I would assume that's not an option in this case?